We were lucky to catch up with Richard Provencio recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Richard, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I knew from a very young age that I wanted to do something creative. I didn’t realize it back then but I really was a master of overcoming boredom by using my imagination. I’d often set up and act out major battle scenes with my GI JOEs, Micro Machines, or Star Wars action figures; or sometimes I’d record gibberish talk shows or improvised raps on my Fisher Price speaker microphone thingy. As a latchkey kid I was doing stuff like that A LOT. In my adolescence I found skateboarding and that became my main outlet for my creativity. With that came a very early exposure to cameras, which at the time was not very common for a 13 year old to have. Initially it’d be our parents’ old camcorders and slowly with enough birthdays and Christmases combined my crew’s equipment got more and more sophisticated. In high school I studied animation, filmmaking, graphic and web design. Creating was in my heart but unfortunately, I’d got into a little trouble on my 16th birthday and because of that I carried a lot of guilt and shame and so when the time came to think about going to either an art school or a film school, one, I knew we couldn’t afford it, and two, I didn’t think I deserved to be able to go. So instead I joined the army, picked up PTSD in Iraq, and was shit back out into civilian life as a much less colorful version of myself. I used the GI Bill to go back to school but I studied accounting because it was super pragmatic. I had a natural aptitude for math and it was a high paying job. I became a CPA (certified public accountant), got a job doing tax work and eventually began to hate what I did and who I was doing it for. I started moonlighting as a comedian doing stand up and improv as a creative outlet and an escapist fantasy. After a couple years as I was starting to get serious with my comedy I felt it was time to invest in a camera to film my sets and make sketches and submit for shows or whatever. My older brother, a photographer himself, recommended I get a DSLR as opposed to a camcorder because “the video quality is better plus you can take photos with it” so that’s what I did. After that the snowball began flying down the hill and growing tremendously. Photography itself became my obsession, more so than comedy or anything else. I was reading any how-to book I could, I was taking photography classes online and in person in my free time, at the same time I was avoiding my accounting continuing education classes to keep up my CPA license, because they suck butts and are really boring. And THAT was when I realized, “Oh man. I think I might be in the wrong career.” Ever since then I’ve been on a journey to make my life in photography and art.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Sure. My name is Richard Provencio but I produce work under the pen name Richard Richard Richards. I am primarily a visual artist with photography as my medium of choice, though currently I am working on some filmmaking projects so I have been expanding into motion and sound as well. I also love to write and draw, and I am what’s considered a recovering comedian which means I no longer seek out performing on stage, but if I find a way to make you laugh I will try my hardest to either make your drink come out of your nose, or to make you laugh so hard you pee yourself, ideally both. Like a Rob Machado of comedy, I am soul surfing now. I came to a career in fine art by way of chance really, though some might say there is more of a cosmic force at play. Some might say that as I have grown to embrace my true self I have opened myself up to the universe. Some might say that in doing so the universe itself has been giving back to me in opportunities and an inexplicable cosmic timing. Some might say this allows me to exist on this path toward a peak version of myself as I approach a type of enlightenment that we humans can barely even begin to understand. Some might say a lot of things. Some might even say that’s all a crock of shit.
In all honesty, as much as I hate labels, I will admit that as a photographer I am primarily what one might call a “street photographer” and I got my start in photography in a way many street photographers get their start. That is through skateboarding. Though it wasn’t a straight line from skateboarding to photography for me, skateboarding was the reason for my first exposure to working with cameras, primarily camcorders, when I was around 13. At about 17 I started keeping a point and shoot camera with me most of the time and that was basically my MO until the iphone cameras became decent. Then when I started doing comedy in my late 20’s and early 30’s I invested in my first “full manual” camera and it was all downhill after that. Nowadays I won’t leave my house without a camera.
As a fine artist I sell limited edition prints, and post cards of my favorite and most meaningful photos which I lovingly refer to as my horcruxes. If there are any HP diehards freaking out by the reference: worry not friend, there is no murder involved in the production of my work but there is most certainly a piece of my heart and soul in each of the prints that I offer which is where the comparison comes from. I have been selling my work for three years now and this year I am most excited to announce that I am releasing my first book, Ric Pics Vol 1: Loosey Goosey due out in the spring! It is a soft cover book with 100 pages and over 100 photos. I’m stoked to begin my experimentation with the book format as it allows me to deliver many photos as a collection of work to my fans and supporters in a way that is both exciting and democratic. I get not everyone can afford a limited edition print especially not one of my large prints which are an edition of 1, but something like this book which will sell for $25 is accessible to a very wide audience and offers much more bang for the buck. As someone who wants to produce work for the people the affordability and accessibility of my work is something that is very important to me and I am excited to further my exploration in book making.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

As I mentioned in some of my answers to earlier questions there was a regrettable time in my life where I was working full time as a tax accountant. At this time I was moonlighting as a stand up comic and improviser primarily “for the price of on the house.” It was during this time doing comedy where I acquired my first real camera and fell deeply in love with photography. After a few years I came to the tough realization that my comedy “career” was not going to get me out of accounting any time soon, but that photography could. So I spent a few months figuring out what kind of photography business I could start that would 1) pay me well enough to live, and 2) not make me want to jam freshly sharpened pencils into both of my corneas. Eventually, I landed on a niche genre of family photography sometimes called “family photojournalism” or “documentary family photography.” It’s basically a style where you embed with a family for a lengthy period, following a virtual mentor I modeled my business after a full day session. From the time the kids wake up until the time they go to bed I would be on location taking candid pictures of the family as they lived their life. I told my accounting boss that I wanted to reduce my workload by half for a year and then I would be going full time as a photographer, to which they agreed. So during that year I worked my butt off to get my business up and running. I did a bunch of test shoots with family and friends to get my portfolio and marketing materials ready. I wrote a bunch of copy. I got my business cards made. I put my website together. I had all my business filings and bank accounts set up. I was rocking and rolling and I’d lined up 2 of my first paying clients for sessions to take place just after my final tax deadline as a CPA which would have been April 15, 2020.
Now as you might have imagined, in the spring of 2020 no one wanted me or anyone in their house due to the global pandemic. Full acknowledgement that I am alive and well and I made out much better than over 1 million people who passed during the pandemic and the millions more who suffer from covid related illness still, but the pandemic did totally torpedo my business which involved me spending long periods of time in close proximity to my clients. So I pivoted from family photojournalism, to just photojournalism. I covered a number of stories around the civil unrest that started in the late spring of 2020 and activism against the Trump administration. Eventually I’d learn that photojournalism was not for me either but in 2020 and into 2021 that documentary work that I was doing gave me a great sense of purpose and it landed me in a place where I was comfortable shooting in virtually any kind of situation and confronting what I wanted to shoot and not compromising for anything less. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since as a fine artist. So I’d say my openness to pivoting and the resilience to keep working even though I didn’t know exactly what the outcome would be was what lead me to my final form as an artist.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

A few years ago I might have said something about sharing my loves of comedy and philosophy, or teaching people to slow down and see the extraordinary among the ordinary, or displaying the human condition and my take on what that means. And those are all true things that I strive to do in my photography and creative work. However, in the past year or so I have come to realize that what’s more important is just being at play and being open to self-discovery in my work. I want that to be at the center of my work because it’s what makes me, me. I think we as people can greatly benefit from our own self-discovery journeys and while they’re all individual we can also benefit by seeing someone else who has gone before us. So I would like to give a roadmap to my journey in the hope that it might help illuminate even a small piece of the overlapping path for someone else.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ricpics.me
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ricpics.me
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVWjegRXjuleV7Um81D6ZlA

Image Credits
All images taken by Richard Richard Richards a.k.a. Richard Provencio.