Flight
“It’s one thing to stand on a corner, not wanting to intrude on your subject matter. But it is something else to take home that moment and have it forever.”
“Flight is my first book of street photography. It was how I viewed the world in 1977 and to a large extent, how I still view the world 40 years later. But it was daunting to bare my soul to the public, wondering if anyone would resonate with my work. If there is one thing I look for in a photograph, it’s a simple truth; something to remind us what is important and lasting. The images in this collection are a compilation of moments; moments of love, loneliness, and loss. They are images that make up our daily lives, the people we pass on the street, a father and son laying on the grass, a grandpa photographing his grandson, and the visual incongruity of a man sitting on a large plastic hamburger on the roof of his car. I sought to capture humor, irony, pathos and the poignant moments that are fleeting - two little girls, arm and arm walking through cornfields. It’s one thing to stand on a corner, not wanting to intrude on your subject matter. But it is something else to take home that moment and have it forever. These images are now the fabric of my life. They helped set me on a path that led to a lifetime of covering people and places and the stories they hold.” Richard Olsenius
The Moments
For me my passion since I was 18 or 19 has been to photograph people and landscapes. I remember leaving the Midwest and moving out to NYC back around 1967 as a college dropout and buying my first 35mm. I wandered around the village making photographs and really fell in love with the way the camera helped me interact with people. There was something I saw that for the first time reached deep inside me. It felt so natural and real that I’ve never turned back.
But it wasn’t very long before I felt like a fish out of water in the big city, having no direction or something, away from home where I had been imprinted with big horizons and farmland and lots of swedish relatives (my grandparents emigrated from Sweden). But whatever the reason, I came back to Minnesota to go to college and I followed a journalism sequence and one day I found myself applying for a summer internship at the Mpls Star, and got it and spent many years driving out from the Twin Cities into the country looking for pictures or working on picture magazine stories or doing the annual farm tour. But it was the opportunity to have these moments, that fleeting few seconds where
The Street
“Where one says street photography, it can mean so many things. But for me having the good fortune to work for a large city newspaper, I found myself out in different groups, locations and events nearly every day. It was like an ongoing film sequence. Everything had movement that led to compositions and unusual lighting and moments that seem to be propped up by emotions, or little stories either imagined or real. Being on the street with a camera was like an invite to long-running play.”
Richard Olsenius
