Anna Peekstok Communications
Seattle, WA 206-524-5050 ap@annapeekstok.com
Rick Rickman: Building Stories with Pictures
PhotoMedia, Fall 2001
Lugging 60 pounds of gear around snowy mountains and crouching on the bottoms of swimming pools were not what Rick Rickman had in mind in his mid-20s, when he was in his first year of dental school. But then a friend introduced him to photography. It wasn’t long before he dropped out of school and, with a portfolio of only six pictures, applied for his first newspaper job in 1977.
“The Santa Fe New Mexican was looking for a part-time photographer,” Rickman says. The editor “looked at my six pictures and said, ‘Do you have any more?’ And I said no, and he looked startled and said, ‘How long have you been doing this?’ And I said, ‘About five or six months.’”
Rickman convinced the editor to let him work without pay for two days, and got three simple assignments—all head shots—the first day. He scheduled them in the morning and spent the afternoon walking around the city shooting feature pictures. When he turned these in along with his assigned photos, the editor told him he could have the job.
Rickman spent the next 12 years working for newspapers in New Mexico, Colorado, Iowa and California, shooting whatever subject he was assigned and honing his craft. “I keep trying to improve my storytelling ability because I really think that’s what I do well,” he says. “If I have a specialty, it’s the ability to go out and build stories with pictures.”
Higher, stronger, faster
Rickman has covered every Olympic Games since 1980, first for newspapers and later for Newsweek. While working for the Orange County Register, however, he made some of his most celebrated photographs at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. His coverage of the massive event won Rickman a Pulitzer Prize.
The prize was a just reward for the many hours of hard work Rickman put into capturing split-second images of the best athletes in the world. “People always think of photography as such a glamour job,” he says. “They just have no idea of how difficult, physically demanding, it sometimes is.”
Some of the difficulty, he adds, comes from the inherent cold and wind-driven snow of the winter Olympics. “Those are long days, usually 18 to 20 hours,” he says. “By the end of 17 days, you are just hammered.”
Out on his own
In the late 1980s, Rickman started thinking about going freelance. “There’s a level of politics involved in newspapers that sometimes gets in the way of good work,” he says, “and I wanted to get off on my own. I had a feeling it would help my career, and it would certainly force me to be a broader individual.”
While still working at the Orange County Register, he started making contacts at magazines and doing occasional freelance jobs. By the time he left the paper in 1990, he was so well prepared that the hardest part of the transition was emotional. “You’re nervous when stepping out on your own for the first time,” he explains with a laugh. “You don’t relax a lot.”
At newspapers, he had often worked with writers, but as a freelancer he found such collaboration rare. “In magazine work, a photographer may not ever see the writer,” he says. “The potential is always there to get your wires crossed. It makes you much more conscious of not only taking good pictures, but getting good information.”
His income was less steady, as well. “When you’re freelancing, your working capital ebbs and flows,” Rickman says. “It’s always an issue. It was just a little more drastic this time.”
Since he went the freelance route, Rickman’s shooting schedule forces him to spend from three to six months away from home during any given year, leaving him little time to see his 18-year-old son, Dillon, and his 7-year-old daughter, Sloane. Throughout, he says, his wife, Marla, has been patient and understanding.
“I’m fortunate in that regard, because this is one of those professions that are notoriously hard on families,” Rickman says.
Breaking into the SEALs
Most of the work published in magazines today is text-driven, with photography used to illustrate the ideas, Rickman says. “But sometimes, if you’re really lucky, you have a piece that’s driven by photography.”
It can take persistence as well as luck, as Rickman discovered when he approached the U.S. Navy with his idea of documenting the training of Navy SEAL (special forces) recruits.
The Navy rejected the idea, but Rickman kept trying. “I kind of made a pest of myself,” he admits. “I kept going back and checking in.”
Eventually he found a Navy press officer who seemed to like the idea. “I think he talked to the admiral’s office and the SEAL training base,” Rickman says. “A couple of weeks later, I was down in San Diego and stopped in at the training office, and I got the brush-off.” A couple of days after that, “I got a call asking if I could be down at their base at 5 a.m. in two days.”
Rickman spent two or three days a week at the base over a seven-month period, documenting the rigorous process by which a group of 144 recruits became a graduating class of 39 SEALs. “The one stipulation that they made very clear was that I couldn’t interfere or interrupt or stop things at any time,” he says. “I just had to be there and catch things as they went.”
About halfway through taking the SEALs photos, he still had yet to find a buyer for them and found himself running seriously short on cash. Fortunately, his agent, Barbara Sadick, agreed to split the project’s cost and help him find a market for the photos, which eventually ran in U.S. News & World Report and the London Times.
“The thing I love about my job is that I get to see history unfold in front of me. I don’t have to rely on anybody else to fill me in on the details.”
Quieter moments
When asked how he defines himself as a photographer, Rickman says he tries to avoid being pigeonholed in any one specialty. “I get asked all the time, ‘What’s your favorite subject?’ And I always tell people I don’t have one, because every aspect of photography has its own challenges, and I like all of them,” he says. “When I feel like I need a break, I try to go pursue some other kind of work.”
Though he is perhaps best known as a sports photographer, Rickman’s tastes are not limited to subjects that require 1/2,000th-second shutter speeds. In addition to athletes in their moments of glory and mud-spattered recruits, his portfolio includes character studies, quiet scenes and even celebrity portraits, though Rickman says this last category sledom tempts him because the subjects and their publicists can be difficult to deal with.
Other assignments have taken him to such contemplative locales as a remote river in China and a monastery in Ireland. “I find I’m really drawn to those quiet moments,” he says of these more intimate settings. “I photograph a lot of them.”
Currently, Rickman’s work has been focusing on the nation’s burgeoning elderly population. In these recent photos of ordinary, active senior citizens, he shows that being over 65 does not mean that life itself is over.
“The perception is that aging is a really awful thing, but the reality is that more and more people are staying active,” he says. “I’ve been chasing some of them around. It’s wonderfully inspirational.”
Fighting the cutbacks
Since he started out more than 20 years ago, Rickman says, he has seen some changes in his field. Cameras have improved, allowing photographers to concentrate less on technicalities and more on aesthetic issues such as composition and light. Unfortunately, the market has also changed. Newspapers and magazines have downsized over the past decade and cut back on their use of pictures.
“There are fewer outlets to publish the good work that’s produced, which is making it very competitive,” Rickman says. “And it’s becoming harder to find publications that are willing to commit to the time it takes to do compelling stories and issue pieces.
“The kinds of things that really deserve space and attention usually take a fair amount of time to produce, and that eats into a magazine’s budget, so it’s not always well received,” he adds. “That’s why I think you see so many portraits and celebrity pictures ... not that good portraiture is easy, but it’s quick and there’s not a lot of research.”
To combat these forces, Rickman says, he tries to stay in close contact with his photo and story editors. If he finds himself coming up with truly compelling images, sometimes the story’s space can be expanded.
“Sometimes the cold hard reality is they just don’t have the space,” he adds, “but you shoot it anyway. All you ever get is the opportunity, and what you do with the opportunity is the important thing.”
For Rickman, however, the pullof the story, and the chance to tell that story through his pictures, is what keeps him going in this shrinking business. “I get to meet some of the most interesting people on earth and share in their lives and experiences firsthand,” he says. “And the other thing I love aobut my job is that I get to see history unfold in front of me. I don’t have to rely on anybody else to fill me in on the details.”
Anna Peekstok is a freelance writer living in Seattle.