Who is Richard Cross?
By Pilar de Haro, Technical Archivist, Tom & Ethel Bradley Center
A couple of months have passed since I began working on the Richard Cross collection at the Tom and Ethel Bradley Center, at California State University, Northridge. As a technical archivist, my role is to preserve and digitize photographs and provide supporting metadata and research for each photo. Although metadata can be limiting based on photographer notes and what I can find to corroborate names, events, and people — research is the best part of metadata.
Richard Cross was a photojournalist who documented the wars and genocides in Central America in the 1980s. He freelanced for news outlets including the AP, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, and others during his visits to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. He was a young guy traveling to dangerous places to take photographs.
My immersion into the Richard Cross collection has led me to learn more about him, and understand his approach as a photographer and visual anthropologist. My mentor here found a snippet of his handwritten notes, that was titled, “Why risk life” which lists four reasons:
1. “Social Concern”
Cross writes, “This came as a result of living in a third world country for 5 years and experiencing first-hand the poor and class struggle.”
2. “Practical”
“Since photojournalists is medium and committed to and trained for, and since I am not adequately wealthy, I must make a living from this visual medium,” said Cross, in his notes.
3. “Adventure”
He writes, “Escape the boredom and alienation one feel(s) in U.S. society.”
4. “What does El Salvador have to with the U.S.?”
“Photographing war in Central America, for me has to do not only with getting good shots which tell the news at the moment but also with getting pictures which, when joined with other images and text, tell a story which reflects a more systematic and synthetic approach to the situation. An approach which is perhaps more historical because it attempts to show relationships existing between the present and the past,” wrote Cross.
In the next couple of months, I plan to advance my research by learning more about the personal stories and historical context of the Central American revolutions through the lens of Richard Cross.