Unable to find the right photographs of wooden buildings in Georgetown for her child’s assignment, Amanda Richards and her then primary school child armed themselves with a ‘point and shoot camera’ and roved the streets of the city, taking what they considered to be the right photographs of various buildings.
That was in 2009. She shared those photographs on the internet site Flicker, so that other children could have access to decent pictures of wooden buildings in Georgetown.
“So that is essentially how I started, with a little tiny point and shoot camera,” Richards said in a recent sit down with the Sunday Stabroek.
It is now 2017, and Richards’s photography can rightfully be described as authentic and iconic. She has gone from knowing nothing about photography to being known for some of the most beautiful, peculiar and in some instances entrancing images.
She has upgraded from that ‘point and shoot’ camera to some modern pieces of equipment to ensure that she gets the perfect image. It is a hobby, she says, and she actually has a day job, but she spends money, time and energy on taking thousands of images just for the love of it. She recalled that her father took photographs but as a child and young adult she never had an interest.
And although she has taken more images than she can count, she is still searching for that one authentic photograph that for her, epitomizes her body of work. Many might want to say that she has already done so as Richards’s breathtaking images are frequently lauded on social media, especially Facebook.
“The idea is capturing something in an authentic format so it looks real. I don’t like the fake pictures where the colour is pumped up. I don’t do those. If I am doing that I would do it full out and say it is an abstract and I would tell you up front that I played with it. But I don’t know how to use Photoshop,” Richards said.
An introvert by admission, Richards does not easily share her thoughts; it takes some probing but once she begins a conversation it becomes evident why she is hesitant as she shares deeply and passionately and you are enthralled.
Apart from being a wife and mother, and a director at Farfan & Mendes, photography is where Richards spends most of her time, but prior to this new passion (she would say her real love) she had the interesting hobby of being a reviewer of products sold on Amazon. She was so good that she was once listed as the 22nd reviewer worldwide for the website. She once even met up with fellow reviewers in New York for dinner, which was paid for by Amazon.
When Richards takes impactful photographs, especially of children in certain areas, she would often print them and return to present them to their parents.
‘Pretty well’
Richards shared that her initial photographs did “pretty well” on Flicker and persons started to thank her for taking the initiative as they were using them for various projects.
“So I started looking around to see what else I can put up there so that people can use for things like that. I started going to the Promenade Gardens and Botanical Gardens and taking flowers, which was my next love after the first set of wooden buildings,” she said with a small laugh.
She spent about half an hour before work taking these photographs, which included butterflies and lizards among others, and posted them on Flicker as Facebook was not ‘her thing’ as yet.
These graduated into monuments and other historic places in Guyana as she thought these would be of interest for school projects.
“So that is how it started. And then I realised that well you can’t catch birds with this little camera and then we got a better camera and then I realised I can’t stand up on the seawalls and catch pelicans with this camera and I got another camera….”
Never wanting to focus on one type of photography, Richards allowed her hobby to evolve naturally. If she wanted to take a particular type of photograph she used the web (particularly YouTube and Google) as her teacher and learnt by trial and error.
She hated taking portraits because she never got them right, but after turning to her ‘teachers she realised what she was doing wrong and now she loves taking portraits of children. “It is something I love to do now because they are fun, obviously.” She builds relationships with the children (many of them attend the Marian Academy which her son also attends and where she is the resident photographer) and always gets the perfect photograph, and not a posed one. The funny result is that at times as she could be out somewhere and a random child would run up to her and hug her and say ‘I know you, I know you.’
“Their parents would look at me like ‘Whaaat? Who is this woman with my children?’ and I would quickly say, ‘School, they know me from school,’” Richards said, laughing.
After she started taking photographs for the school’s yearbook, parents began approaching her and she would stick around and take more; and for the Mashramani concerts, “when all those little children look so cute in their costumes. You have to take all of them, you just have to,” she laughed. “As it is right now, whenever there is an event, before I get home, the messages start coming in ‘When you posting?’”
All of it she does “out of love” and though she is sometimes paid, it is nothing that would compensate for her time, energy and camera equipment, which she upgrades every so often as cameras are constantly getting better.
Richards does not “blow my own trumpet,” but simply says, “I think I have an eye for framing the picture composition wise… I can drive down the road and say wait I have to come back and take a picture of this house, this house is it.”
Richards always sees the story in the pictures.
Full-time job
Apart from having a full-time job and doing housework, Richards also goes swimming three times a week.
She has been at Farfan & Mendes for 23 years. Before that, she worked at the Royal Bank of Canada, which was later National Bank of Industry and Commerce (NBIC) and now is Republic Bank. Her qualifications are in banking and marketing and she is an associate of the Institute of Canadian Bankers. She left NBIC as an assistant manager in charge of savings, primarily because of the late hours and went to work at a sawmill “because it looked like fun at the time,” which was Caribbean Resources Ltd.
“I sold lumber for about three years because it was just up the road from where we lived, so I used to walk over…,” Richards said, adding that she later sold pharmaceuticals at the NewGPC for about a year before moving on to her present job.
“I think I have finally found somewhere that is comfortable and of course I can set my own hours to a major extent which is good for what I do as a hobby…,” Richards said of her present employer.
But she is forced to have a schedule as there are so many events and the requests to cover them are just as many and she must find time for her family. She is very selective about the events she covers as she just “does not have the physical time” and so birthdays and weddings are out. “I don’t like the formal types of photography either, those bore me to tears because there is no spontaneity… When I go to a wedding I would take the camera, but I would look for the little bridesmaid picking up the petals off the floor and eating them, or troubling somebody, diving under the bride’s dress, that’s what I would look for.”
If she goes to a body-building show she sometimes forgets about the faces of the body builders because she is zooming in on their abs. She goes to all the events of the Guyana Hindu Dharmic Sabha as she loves taking photographs of dancers in action “because there is colour, fast dancing and not everybody can capture that in a low light situation…without using a flash.” Richards said she learnt it because “it’s for me and I don’t like doing what everybody else is doing.
“I will always look for the shot that nobody else would get or if it is something at the seawalls where everybody is there I would try to look for an angle, time of day or something that people don’t normally shoot.
“That is why it is a hobby, it is a challenge and the more difficult it is to capture the shot the more I want to do it.”
Because of how meticulous she is, Richards said that even if there are a thousand similar photographs of an object or event she can always tell which one is hers from a mile away.
And because of the time and the energy she spends behind each image Richards, like any artist, fights against her images being used without permission especially for advertising purposes. Those who use her images for advertising purposes must not only have permission but “pay something” while there are others she would allow to use the photographs “and just stick my name somewhere.” School children who use her photos for projects have carte blanche permission to do so.
“But if you are going to advertise from it and earn money from it [she slips into the vernacular] leh I get two dollars for it too nah omigoy. I buy the camera, went out in the weather to take the picture, went home and got it in a format that you could use and you just sit behind your computer and say thanks and charge somebody for the ad.”
She is not comfortable with the tag ‘The Amanda Richards’—as she was referred to when one of her photographs was the subject of discussion at her husband’s workplace and a colleague asked him if his wife was “The Amanda Richards”. He responded he knows her as Amanda Richards.
“I don’t like that kind of limelight,” she said.
Richards said she would continue to take photographs as long as her legs and arms function.
You listen and you want more but then she abruptly ends the conversation with, “…that’s enough talking for a month” and the interviewer knows that the interview is over. The story would be told, but she has stopped sharing.
