Richard Speedy

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Bio


Richard Speedy grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. He graduated from Princeton High school where he was active in music, theater and outdoor activities. He picked up the camera at an early age and many of the earliest photos in the family scrapbook show him with a Kodak Brownie hanging around his neck. As the pages turn he disappears more and more from view as he takes his place behind the lens of the family camera.


He studied photography at New York Institute of Photography, worked at a variety of jobs, and finished his studies at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California. In 1972 Richard relocated to New York City where he worked as an assistant to many of New York's best advertising photographers shooting everything from fashion, to still-life, to automobiles.

During this time period he also worked on several personal projects and received support and recognition for this work in the form of two fellowships from the NJ Council on the Arts. This work culminated in several shows one of which was reviewed by David Shirey of the New York Times. In that review Shirey, among other things, stated:

"......... we might not see the same things Richard Speedy sees. Most of us do not have his poetic vision or his instantaneous grasping of the beautiful in nature, or his fantasy. At times, the pictures look like storybook images, as in one photograph of mushrooms with their long stalks and umbrella caps amidst a blur of plants, they are creatures of another world."

In 1980, along with photographer Toby Richards, he founded Richards and Speedy Studio and for the next 22 years he devoted his time and energy toward running a 5000 square foot studio with a staff of 6-8 people. The studio produced many award winning images for ad campaigns, annual reports and catalogs. Clients included Sony, Johnson & Johnson, Bennetton and many more. It was a very busy and rewarding period, but with little time left over for personal work.

In the year 2002 Richard and Toby decided to close Richards and Speedy Studio, open their own separate studios and spend more time exploring other worlds. Current projects Richard is working on include Flora: still life images of flowers and other specimens from the natural world, Passage: ethereal color landscapes depicting the transitory nature of the Earth around us and Dancing Under the Moon, an in-depth portrait of the Sierra Tarahumara and Raramuri people of Chihuahua, México. He recently had a show at the New Mexico State University in Las Cruces and several additional shows are in the works.