Proof: Cory Richards on Pushing Through the Struggle | National Geographic

after dropping out of high school I
found myself running up against all
sorts of you know people who were
telling me what to do how to do it that
I was screwed up that I wasn’t going to
succeed that I was on the wrong path and
and that became very important for me
too
I guess to prove people wrong and it
became this way to tell the story of
sort of struggle that I was feeling
internally and and I expressed that
through climbing and then through the
story of climbing through photography I
realized that being in these places was
an incredible way to tell a story to
show what it feels like to be reduced to
nothing willfully and then pushed
through that and to cry and struggle and
be rubbed raw you know in a way that a
lot of people don’t ever get to
experience and taking photos of that
allows people that experience on some
level the images that speak to me are
the ones that make me feel they’re the
ones that make your hair stand up on the
back of your neck or give you goosebumps
if my photographs in any way make
somebody feel fear or joy or love or
vulnerability I’ve succeeded you could
be in the dirtiest place in the world
with most smog in the world you could be
someplace where generally speaking
nobody thinks of beauty but if
somebody’s living you know really living
and showing that human experience that
to me is the beauty of the landscape
every single place we are there’s
incredible amounts of just raw human and
natural beauty happening everywhere