Richard Rieckenberg Biography

I have been blessed, or perhaps cursed (I’m not sure which), with having done a number of things in my life without quite mastering any of them. I have been a starving tennis pro, a naval submarine officer, an engineer, a high school teacher, a college professor, and a business executive. One day soon I hope to decide what I want to be when I grow up.

Photography has been one of the constants in my life. I began by photographing my children many years ago. It became a means to sustain me during the sometimes traumatic times of being a naval officer during the Cold War and the first Persian Gulf War. This is why I occasionally speak of photography in spiritual terms (as you can tell from my Home Page).

I became a businessman fairly late in life and, while I achieved some measure of financial success, I began to become unsatisfied. I watched the events of 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina and I knew that I had become nothing more than a spectator who complained about the problems of the world without the slightest inclination to help.

I got a kick in the butt when I was unceremoniously fired as branch manager of a utilities company immediately after reporting potentially unsafe working conditions. I felt sorry for myself for a couple of weeks and then left for Kansas to help provide disaster relief to flood victims for the American Red Cross.

That was a couple of years ago. I still do disaster relief. I am deeply honored to have led a group of wonderful people in providing food, shelter, and emergency supplies to victims of recent disasters; the tsunami in American Samoa, hurricanes Dolly, Gustav, and Ike, fires in northern and southern California, and several floods. I also work with small businesses in northern New Mexico and Tanzania (a very unusual combination) to try to make them more profitable. Of course, I still pursue my photography. My philosophy is getting simpler as I grow older; if each of your actions is based on sincerity and honor then the things we normally spend our days and nights stressing about tend to work themselves out. That doesn’t mean you get everything you want, but you get what makes you strong, and what makes you compassionate, and what makes life worth living. It’s when you start to worry about money, “stuff”, social status, and power that life, paradoxically, becomes less fulfilling. This is admittedly sometimes a hard philosophy for me, it is by no means original, and I am by no means the poster child for its success. But so far, so good. Even after all of these years and all of these careers, I am still a work in progress.