“Our job is to take these unknown places and make people care about them.” —Jim Richardson

Jim Richardson first fell in love with photography on his parent’s wheat and dairy farm in Kansas. Since then, his painterly landscape and portrait photography has taken him worldwide, from the lush green hills of Scotland to the dry desert landscapes of Syria.

In 1971, he abandoned a psychology major at Kansas State University to begin a photo internship at the Topeka Capital-Journal. In the intervening 15 years, Richardson’s work was published in many major publications, ranging from Life and Time to Sports Illustrated and the New York Times. Richardson’s first story for National Geographic magazine appeared in 1984. Since then, he has become one of the