Most kids dream about getting out of the small town where they live – Russell Graves was different. He sought out a career path that would specifically allow him to live in a small, rural community. Most kids that end up staying in a small town seem to forget the dreams they had and live out the same kind of lives as generations before them. Graves is, again, different.

This nationally recognized photographer/writer treasures the rural lifestyle, and he and wife Kristy are raising their two kids in the same manner with which they grew up. However, he’s also found a way to reach way beyond the limits of Childress, Texas, where he calls home, with a compelling message about the people, wildlife, livestock and traditions that make rural areas so special.

With a nationally published photography portfolio (name a cattle magazine or outdoor publication and you may have seen some of his shots in their pages), six books, tons of magazine articles, numerous blogs and a new documentary to open nationwide in July among his credits, Graves is making is making a role for himself as the voice of the rural story.

“My folks ran cattle six or seven miles outside of town (in northeast Texas) and I grew up roaming creek bottoms, learning to make my own fun,” explains the 41-year-old former high school ag teacher. “My older brother and I grew up in semi-isolation, with no close neighbors. The nearest kids our age were about two miles away, which was a long way to ride your bike. My brother introduced me to outdoor fun, things like trapping, hunting and fishing.”

On his website, Graves recalls being scolded for looking at white-tailed deer rather than some lost cattle he was supposed to be finding. As he got older, he grew more interested in the cattle, hay and wheat his family raised, but continued to roam the Blackland Prairie, bottomlands and nearby Bois d’Arc Creek in search of an amazingly diverse array of wildlife.

During their explorations, the Graves brothers saw everything from deer and ducks to turkey, badgers, foxes, otters and other critters that aren’t “supposed” to call the muddy waters and surrounding trees home.

Goodbye to Bois d’ Arc Creek is the documentary Russell made, documenting the process as the creek and surrounding woods (which serves as a major drainage source in Fannin County) is cleared, dammed and 16,000 surrounding acres flooded to create a reservoir to feed the water appetite of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.

In a preview of the film shown in a Texas Parks & Wildlife show on PBS, one scene is filmed as the he and his brother take what is undoubtedly one of their last canoe trips down the creek (heavy equipment has already started clearing trees and brush). Russell explains the film is not meant to be activist project against the reservoir.

“This is about how a creek, muddy and insignificant to most, transforms,” he voices over. “If we can show our love of this and let people understand how important culturally, historically and naturally this bottomland is to this county – and these types of bottomlands are to Texas – then maybe that will change some minds in the future.”

Fostering understanding between rural people and their urban counterparts seems to be a driving motivation behind much of what he does. For example, Graves fervently desires for the people living in the Metroplex – who will benefit from the reservoir – to better understand where the water comes from, and how their decisions affect people living some distance from the city.

“In 2006, during the drought, we went to Dallas and everywhere you looked you saw new subdivisions wasting water with fountains overflowing and sprinklers everywhere. It’s a clash of civilizations,” he says.

Helping rural folks and city people appreciate the complexity of the give-and-take nature of their relationship sounds like an overwhelming endeavor, but this easy-going Texan has never been one to back down from a challenge.

First Photos

When Russell was 17, his older brother, Bubba, joined the army. Stationed in Alaska, he took a camera to capture images of that amazing landscape, which eventually got handed down to his little brother. Russell quickly became enamored with taking pictures of all the familiar things in his environment, and soon people were telling him how good his pictures were. So, with the confidence of a 17-year-old, he drove to town and mailed some photos to a wildlife magazine.

“The rejection letter almost beat me back from the post office,” he says. “But no one ever told this country kid that he couldn’t do something.” He kept at it and by the time Graves was 19 his first photos were published and the following year he had a photo selected for a cover of a cattle magazine.

Today, his work has been published by clients such as Field and Stream, BEEF Magazine, the Smithsonian Magazine, Texas Parks & Wildlife, The Cattleman, Persimmon Hill, Outdoor Life, and many, many others. His website, www.russellgraves.com, has a gallery of thousands of images, some purchased by magazines, others used in commercial advertising and even a Korean Airlines publication.

He also posts videos from time to time, and if you want to get a good case of goose bumps, take a few minutes to watch “Black Blizzard.” In it, Graves captures the surreal nature of a major West Texas windstorm where dirt blocks the sun from view and anything caught in the ferocious wind’s path is sandblasted into misery. The camera closes on the birth of a hungry wildfire, one of many that made headlines this spring.

Graves was once tapped for a photo shoot on an offshore oil rig, not only due to his camera skills, but also because he could “speak the language” of the small-town folks who worked the rig. He also puts on photography seminars for a variety of clientele, including the outdoor retail giant, Bass Pro Shops.

Teaching Outside the Box

Graves certainly has a special gift for instructing others, which is the vehicle that allowed him to stay a country boy in the first place.

“Teaching was a means to an end for me,” he says. “I knew I wanted to be a teacher because I wanted to live in a small town and there were three professions that allowed you to do that and make a decent living: teacher, doctor or lawyer. I started out to be a coach, originally. I was really into athletics in high school. But the only sport I really cared to coach was baseball, so I decided to teach agriculture instead.”

In fact, Graves taught high school agriculture for 16 years in Childress, where his students won many state and national awards in leadership and wildlife management projects. In three different years, he was named the Texas Agriscience Teacher of the Year. Once again, Russell Graves was not your typical ag teacher.

In 1995, 10 of his students successfully lobbied the state legislature to name the Longhorn the state (large) mammal. In 1996, a marker was installed at the Childress County Heritage Museum to commemorate an English buffalo hunter named Frank Collinson, who killed 121 buffalo on a single day at a site near the high school. His students did the research that led to the marker.

One of the highlights of his teaching career is an 88-acre tract of land the school was able to buy because of a $48,000 grant Graves solicited from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. On this land, Childress agriculture students have learned advanced wildlife management with a hands-on, high-tech approach. Students used radio telemetry to study quail populations; they have managed and studied white-tailed deer and prairie dogs; and they have used GPS to research cattle grazing patterns.

Every project was designed to benefit the community is some way. For example, one of the deer studies aimed to figure how ranchers could boost their deer season business and another evaluated the viability of a pen-raised quail enterprise. He also taught students a variety of communications skills, including copywriting, video production and other creative means of telling the agriculture story to an audience.

However, Graves’s biggest achievement in teaching may have been his ability to help his students recognize the symbiosis between the land and the people, so that when they become adults, their experiences on a dusty piece of the Texas Panhandle can translate into good decisions about resource use.

Field and Stream named Graves one of their Heroes of Conservation. The word “conservation” is thrown about pretty casually these days, so what does it mean to him personally?

“To me, it’s about finding a balance,” he explains. “The land needs to be used. It needs to be used for the benefit of people, but not for the benefit of only one group of people at the expense of another. I’m a strong proponent for growth. And (as rural people) we need city people to be consumers of our products. However, I think rural people understand the whole food cycle better.

“In our state, there is a lot of discussion about budget cuts. Recently, in the Austin American-Statesman, there was an article about doing away with the Department of Rural Affairs,” Graves says. “This is the department that oversees rural hospitals and all kinds of things that are vital to rural communities. With the online version of the story, people immediately posted comments like: ‘Nobody told you to go live in the sticks in West Texas.’

“The people who post those types of comments obviously don’t get it that every piece of food they eat, every piece of clothing they wear, a lot of the things they use in everyday life, start out as a commodity grown somewhere in a rural community,” he says with exasperation. “We have shared interests that we really need to understand.”

For his part, Graves plans to continue to tell the rural story in as many ways as possible. The ideas for more books and documentaries are germinating and he’s interested in trying his hand at directing and screenwriting, though Graves says he will always be involved with photography. Tackling new challenges seems to be in his blood, just like those who came before us to settle the West and established many of the small towns that are struggling to stay alive today.

“I live here because I want to, not because I have to,” Graves explains. “Telling the rural story is important because there are interesting people here. I want to highlight and cultivate that lifestyle, not just for us but for our grandchildren someday. There are a lot of rural stories that haven’t been told yet. I don’t know if there has ever been a voice to tell those stories.”

Now there is.

Photography Tips

from Russell Graves

So you want to take better pictures around the ranch? Nationally acclaimed rural photographer Russell Graves has two pieces of advice: 1) Think differently; and 2) Don’t let the camera do all the thinking.

“How many photos of a cowboy on a horse at sunset have you seen?” Graves points out. “You have to figure out how to present the same idea in a different way. Practice a lot. Don’t be afraid to fail. And don’t let the camera do all the thinking for you. Play around with the settings until you learn how to use them.

“Another big thing with digital technology is don’t rely on fixing something in Photoshop. I try to get it right the first time. A common mistake I see is that people don’t rely on a tripod,” he adds. “Your images will always be sharper if you get used to using a tripod.”

Surprisingly, in his photography seminars the most common questions asked don’t have anything to do with the camera. His mostly urban audiences want to know instead how to get access to private property.

“I tell them it’s just common sense,” he explains. “Treat someone else’s property the same or better than you would treat your own to be sure that you get invited back.”

On the flip side, while it goes against a westerner’s basic nature, allowing access to your place to a photographer is one way to share agriculture’s story. Letting an outsider see first-hand how well your animals are treated and how you care for the land is powerful and that person’s experience will likely be shared with others. Obviously, you want to lay some ground rules about closing gates, liability and that sort of thing. But the benefits might just outweigh the concerns you have.

“People also ask me about creativity and how you think up shots to take,” Graves adds. “I tell them to study a lot of different photographers’ work to get some inspiration. I even study people who take wedding photography and senior pictures. There is always something you can learn.”

For the record, some of Graves’ favorite photographers are David Sams, Wyman Meinzer and Grady Allen, all from Texas; Chase Jarvis from the West Coast; and Joe McNally in New York. All of these artists have websites you can visit to see some great photography and Graves has an all-agriculture web site at www.picturepasture.com.