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Randy Olson

@randyolson

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Randy started @thephotosociety and with his wife, @melissafarlow, have done over 50 stories for @natgeo

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The Siena International Photo Awards doesn’t simply open—it makes an entrance. @lucaventuriphoto and his family @sienawards have a knack for turning the beginning of SIPA into theater; this year, an aerial performer floated beneath a cloud of balloons over the Piazza del Campo. From there, everyone moved into the Teatro dei Rinnovati for the awards—the sort of room where you half expect to find Shakespeare in a corner, still working away. taken in Siena, Italy by @randyolson

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4 days ago

Annie Dillard changed my life. I didn’t know it at the time.

I was assigned to photograph her at home on Cape Cod. She had a new book and there were so many photographers there that day, but I was the only one who had read her books in anticipation of meeting the woman who wrote “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.”

She noticed.

She let the other photographers go till the next day and we talked for hours. Then, after giving me so much of her time, she handed me the keys to her car so I could go see the Cape.

That was Annie Dillard. She paid attention, and she recognized when someone else had paid attention too.

I understood later what she had shown me: do the work. Read everything. Arrive knowing enough to listen. I have researched every story deeply ever since—because it matters.

It was the first time I did what is now standard.

And the response was so positive it stays with me to this day. I particularly remember quizzing her on how she could go to her writing shed and pull up such vivid details from her youth because I’m trying to do the same now w some of what she taught me.

There are a few people in my life of significance who took the time to figure out what made this kid tick… I remember all of them.

There are people in this world that give the same significance to the immigrant selling roses at open air restaurants in DC as they pay to the president (not this one) she was one of those.

I knew her for only that one day, but I miss her and her incredible intellect.

#anniedillard #anniedillardwisdom by @randyolson

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a month ago

SUBSTACK IN BIO

This couple got distracted and lost their place in line for a waterslide at Kennywood—an amusement park built on soiled industrial ground. To me, it is a metaphor for where we are now: oblivious to history, not noticing what is in front of us, believing it will all somehow work out.

Just take the kids to soccer practice. Nothing to see here.

But my parents taught me to pay attention. One of my earliest memories of photography is my father helping me copy LIFE magazine photographs about pollution for a report I gave to my fellow 10-year-olds. I watched as he fitted equipment onto his rangefinder Leica and set the lights.

It was 1967. I was in fifth grade.

There were 3.5 billion people on Earth then—now 8.3 billion. We have more needs, more consumption, more extraction, and more people living beside the consequences.

In 1967, Los Angeles smog could hide the end of a block. In Cleveland, the Cuyahoga River was so burdened by oil and industrial waste that it caught fire.

There was no EPA. The 1967 Air Quality Act was a beginning, but it left too much to the states.

Creation of EPA and 1970 Clean Air act saved us.

These photographs—made in Weirton, Braddock, Clairton, Milwaukee, Centralia, and West Virginia—are not distant history.

Now the Trump administration has repealed most Biden-era limits on greenhouse-gas pollution from coal- and gas-fired power plants and proposed eliminating the remaining federal power-sector climate rules.

If that survives the lawsuits ahead, future presidents may be unable to restore those protections.

The people living closest to plants, highways, mines, rail corridors, and smokestacks—too often low-income communities and communities of color—will carry the cost first: asthma, damaged lungs, heart disease, stroke, premature birth, and early death.

The couple in the first photograph could be anywhere in America—in love, in the moment, standing above ground already marked by industry.

That is the danger. We have become comfortably numb, looking away from what is beneath us, around us, and increasingly invisible in the air we breathe and water we drink. by @randyolson

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a month ago

A cloud of dust rises under a hard desert sun. From far away, two helicopters look like insects. Then you understand what you are seeing: a herd of wild horses being driven into a trap.

My wife, photographer @melissafarlow, has spent years around wild horses—first on a National Geographic story, then in her book “Wild at Heart.”

She has watched them at water holes: foals beside their mothers, yearlings testing one another, stallions keeping their distance, a whole social world moving across public land.

And she has watched the helicopters come.

The argument is always framed by local ranchers, oil and gas developers, some environmentalists and politicians as a problem of numbers, forage, and cost. Wild horses compete with cattle on public lands, we are told. They forage on plants needed for wildlife. But public lands do not belong to those in the West and the ranchers who live next door any more than they belong to the person living on the 30th floor of a condo building in NYC.

These lands belong to all of us.

A recent New York Times investigation describes how the BLM can sell federally protected mustangs for as little as $25. Once sold, the animals lose their federal protection. Buyers promise not to send them to slaughter—but may resell them to middlemen who are not bound by that promise. That horse can then bring as much as $750 at slaughter facilities.

Project 2025 calls for Congress to let the BLM “dispose humanely” of “excess” wild horses and burros.

This is not a sentimental argument that management is unnecessary. It is an argument that terror, family separation, and a slaughter pipeline should never be the solution we accept for animals.

Melissa wrote: “I do not know how to fix this. I just know I watched a foal graze beside its mother one day, and on the next, a helicopter chased her into a trailer separated from her young one. Whatever side of this you land on in this issue, this should never sit right with anyone.”

The bipartisan SAFE Act would permanently prohibit horse slaughter for human consumption and prohibit the transport, sale, or donation of horses for that purpose. It currently has 230 House cosponsors—but it still needs a vote. by @randyolson

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2 months ago

I’m standing next to this ancient Moai as @melissafarlow and I light it with a flashlight. There are 100 billion stars overhead and almost 100 billion neurons firing in my brain, but the cosmos is so much bigger than both.

The Milky Way is only one galaxy among an unimaginable number, and the observable universe contains on the order of a septillion stars… a number so large it’s impossible to fathom.

Cosmos and consciousness are both shaped by physical laws… stranger than everyday intuition and far more mysterious than we are willing to admit. The particle physicists I’ve talked to always hedge their bets so the world doesn’t think they’re crazy. Some of this stuff scared the bejesus out of Einstein.

News about Quantum computing lacks realization that it’s not the 0s and 1s that allow you to read this. It’s particles like the ones in us that only exist in a range of possibilities.

We are made of quantum fields. Particles can be entangled across distance, vacuum is not “nothing,” and matter itself is a set of probabilities, excitations, and interactions we only partially understand.

So when the world feels obscene, dishonest, and cruel, I remember that the human story is tiny.

Not meaningless… as it consumes our days… but tiny.

We are not the center of anything, and no tyrant, no fraud, or con man gets to claim ultimate authority over reality. The universe does not belong to Tr$mp or his lies... it belongs to evidence, to scale, and that truth survives longer than power.

We are living through a time when corruption is so brazen we ignore it. Tr$mp… a convicted felon and adjudicated sexual abuser who stole from a children’s cancer fund… and one of the most openly corrupt forces ever to occupy the White House, has dragged the country into debt, cynicism, conflict, and moral rot.

What keeps me going is not surrender to his demented delusions, racism, or cruelty.

It is the stubborn fact that truth still exists, that evidence still matters, and that people still have the power to resist what is degrading them.

No matter how powerful… it is small beside what we can only wonder at… and continue to measure, revise, and be amazed at THE MATH of the cosmos. by @randyolson

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3 months ago

Despite all the conspiracy theories about Mitch McConnell, one thing is certain—he is wrapped in the best health care money can buy after spending years helping deny that same grace to others.

History will remember him as the man who took a knife to the Constitution, who blocked a president’s right to appoint a Supreme Court justice and helped lead the Court toward all the cruelty it now embraces.

Which is part of the tragedy, because McConnell was not always universally hated by liberals. When @melissafarlow made these photographs, he was inspecting drainage ditches—still dressed in the old costume of civic decency, before later becoming a willing steward of a politics built on grievance, cruelty, and racism.

These photos were taken at a time when most Republicans were not openly hostile to democracy and so many other foundational values.

The conspiracy theories are probably not true.

Some Republicans say they’ve talked to him.

But the conspiracy version goes like this—McConnell is secretly brain dead, his health is being managed behind the scenes, his wife flew to China to avoid pulling the plug at an inopportune time.

And maybe Republicans do want to block an unusually independent Republican like Thomas Massie with some kind of stunt.

Or maybe a bunch of liberals just read things on the internet, lit their torches, and stormed the castle.

But this is all noise.

The real story is that Mitch McConnell helped break the thing we thought was unbreakable.

Whatever forces acted on him—or whatever hidden part of his soul surfaced—he didn’t start evil. He became it.

The systems and cultures that wrap around us shape us.

If a system is corrupt, many within it become corrupt.

Clarence Th$mas to the Tea Party to Tr$mp—a pyramid building on itself—and Mitch stands in the middle--facilitating, and enabling. An architect of the world Tr$mp would later perfect.

The earlier version of Mitch might have recoiled from this.

But the Mitch who remained—the one shaped by power, by system, by design—if there is something ruthless, strategic, and political to be done, he would be all in.

Photos by @melissafarlow
Words by @randyolson by @randyolson

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3 months ago

Lorman, Mississippi. Shenzhen, China. Oceanside, Oregon.

The places are different, but the question is the same: what does patriotism mean when the country seems to be dissolving under its own weight?

Shenzhen once looked toward America with admiration—enough so that they recreated our icons and landmarks in their amusement parks.

The hippies in Oceanside take me back to the Vietnam era — to people who pushed back against a stupid war and reminded the country that love doesn’t mean obedience.

You can hate a corrupt, incompetent administration and still be a patriot. by @randyolson

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3 months ago

My father turns 99 today.

In pre-school, I didn’t know what photographers did. But when my father was out in the world with a camera, it seemed SWASHBUCKLING.

With his 4x5 Speed Graphic, politicians would walk up to him when he had the camera—and walk right past him when he didn’t.

The photographers at his paper convinced the editors they could use small cameras like Leicas, but they were still setting up three strobes and making the same pictures they did with big cameras. The real value of those small cameras came later.

He photographed Frank Lloyd Wright—a brilliant architect and a bit of a jerk. His favorite story was about a bathroom Wright designed like a conch shell that broadcast whatever anyone was doing in there throughout the house.

When I was in grade school, they were building the St. Louis Arch. My father rode the elevator up the outside before they put in the last piece—and stood outside at the top with one foot on each side—straddling the gap. I told that story at school and my parents got called in so we could all talk about my “lying.”

My father can’t walk past a sad little plant in the grocery store without wanting to put it in the ground. He was the first off the family farm, but his farm boy background is always with him.

He stopped paragliding in his late-80s. Never off the 500-foot cliff in front of our houses—he watched too many people launch from our cliff and come in too hot—into trees, or straight into the ocean, tangled in their lines.

My parents are 99 and 94 and living on their own. We tried bringing in help—once a week—but that didn’t last. “Why would we pay someone to sit around and talk to us?” they said.

We tend to meet the world the way our parents did.

I tease them that if they had just screwed up my childhood, I’d be a better creative.

But they didn’t.

They didn’t because their parents didn’t. I come from generations that were kind to their children.

Wherever I land—it comes from a place my parents gave me. And their parents gave them.

Photos by parents, me, Sterling North and Tom Barlet by @randyolson

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3 months ago

I’m posting pleasant, happy photos to offset—in my own small way—the clown car of history going off the rails in spectacular fashion this week.

I believe eventually our world finds its way back to a healthier place—but it’s been a long year+ of killing cancer research for ballrooms.

And this week, the most powerful man on the planet TACOs away after spending billions on his war of choice, just so he can look good at a cage match on hallowed ground turned into a junkyard for his birthday.

A week where fighters are given full military-style honor parades, then turn around and throw up on the Lincoln Memorial.

A week where sweaty men in shorts fill spaces where some of the most important decisions in our democracy have been made.

A week when a racist trailer-trash fighter casually impugns a former First Lady in the same house where she once served with such dignity.

All of this unfolding in a haze of spectacle and money—staggering amounts spent on one man’s ego—while healthcare and basic human rights remain out of reach for so many.

I keep thinking about the 2006 movie “Idiocracy”—which, admittedly, has some PC issues—but twenty years ago it felt absurd. President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho is a pro wrestler with a cabinet of morons all sponsored by an energy drink: Brawndo. The energy drink sponsor this week at the cage fight was Monster Energy. It’s a corporate-collapsed world, sedated by spectacle—the bread and circuses of the Roman Empire—gladiator theater mashed up with monster trucks. The lead character, a person of average intelligence, stands there looking around, trying to process how any of this could actually be real. The ray of light at the end is when he becomes president and his former prostit$te wife becomes First Lady.

This week, in particular, made me rewatch.

So I write these little missives, and return to these moments I’ve witnessed—these fragments of tenderness, of connection, of happiness—to hold onto the idea that we do eventually overcome hate, corruption, and ignorance—even when it’s coming from the highest levels of our “democracy.”

Photos, words @randyolson by @randyolson

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4 months ago

As this administration accepts white refugees (6,665 white, 3 Afghans) and spends $100 million on the fantasy of “white genocide” for Afrikaners, can we talk about the real thing in Africa that could affect all of us?

Because if it isn’t Ebola in Ituri, it will be the next outbreak.

And that outbreak will be shaped by the conditions we are actively creating: weaker systems, deeper hunger, and more people pushed into desperate forms of survival.

What if that $100 million for relatively wealthy South Afrikaners went instead to disease surveillance, food security, and the public-health systems we keep dismantling?

I’ve seen how survival works there. People do not choose risk because they are reckless; they choose it because the alternatives have been stripped away.

In places like Ituri, hunger pushes people deeper into the bush.

Extraction does the same.

The most violent warlords control mining territory there because that is where the most valuable minerals are found — minerals that help power phones, and missiles.

Extraction pulls people into crowded gold camps where disease can move fast. Camps bring in resupply crews on near-impassable roads, hauling heavy supplies on bicycles just to keep the mines alive.

In these small outposts, the whole desperate economy takes shape: traders, smugglers, sex workers, men with money in their pockets and nowhere stable to spend it, in these spaces built for extraction, not safety.

When food systems collapse and public-health systems are gutted, people survive however they can: hunting, mining, trading, moving, improvising.

The gold economy runs close to the animal populations scientists have warned about. As villages expand around extraction, forests are cut back and the conditions for spillover multiply.

This is a story about policy, abandonment, extraction, and the moral rot of a system that cuts humanitarian capacity and then acts surprised when the world they broke starts breaking back.

Photos, words @randyolson by @randyolson

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4 months ago

Conflict zones and lawless areas have never been my focus, but over the years I’ve spent time in and around them.

Iraq, Libya, Chechnya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Congo—I’ve seen enough to understand the human cost of even small conflicts.

That’s what makes it so hard to watch a draft dodger ordering strikes from a distance, insulated from the consequences.

He should LOOK DIRECTLY INTO THE EYES of the people living with his awful decisions—instead of taxpayers funding more than $100 million in golf outings—detaching even more from the suffering he creates.

We are watching one man create his own personal wars—from tariffs to military action—acting without approval from Congress or the American people, igniting conflicts that harm us and ripple across the globe.

A tariff war so reckless and illegal that corporations get reimbursed while we pay the costs—and get nothing.

A crackdown on immigration that harms innocents while barely touching the “worst.”

A steady erosion of our global standing, pushing it toward lasting damage.

Iran—instability, displacement, worldwide economic shock—and the constant risk of escalation between global powers.

ALL THIS BOMBING—ALL THIS LOSS OF LIFE—while DEMANDING a Nobel Peace Prize.

More than 100 psychologists warned during his first term—breaking with the APA’s Goldwater Rule—that his malignant narcissism imposed a clear danger.

Two more psychologists have weighed in:

Dr. John Gartner describes malignant narcissism combined with psychopathy: chronic dishonesty, lack of conscience—even sadism.

Dr. Bandy Lee adds that, in her clinical view, he shows a dangerous inability to process information or anticipate consequences. She suggests frontotemporal dementia may be amplifying these traits—creating what she calls an acute danger to the nation and the world.

The pressure of so many challenging this narcissist—it looks increasingly like he is headed to NARCISSISTIC COLLAPSE—a serious condition where it becomes easier to burn everything down than admit he’s not what he claims to be.

Photos, words @randyolson by @randyolson

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6 months ago

Many of us who’ve worked for National Geographic magazine know the solitude that comes with this kind of life — long stretches alone in far-off places, chasing photographs to put in your bucket. But Neil @neilshea13 and I have shared a different version of that road.

From the highlands along the Omo River in Ethiopia to the edge of Lake Turkana, we’ve walked through the same villages, ridden in the same dusty cars, slept under the same hard skies. I’ve always admired his eye and his patience — how his writing carries the deliberate gaze of a documentary photographer.

Earlier I posted scans from his field notebooks so you could see how he works — every page marked with sketches and fragments of the world in front of him. He draws what he sees before he writes it, as if building the scene by hand, line by line, until it’s etched into memory.

Neil’s new book, Frostlines, has just been released — already a #1 Amazon pick in its category. It’s set in a colder, harsher landscape, but the same dedication runs through it — the same quiet observation, the same endurance that carried him through desert heat and across ice. Pick up a copy of Frostlines at the link in my bio. by @randyolson

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7 months ago