Remembering Jim Rathert

I still remember the first time I saw one of Jim Rathert’s photographs — a cover image of a prairie chicken booming on its lek. As a young photojournalist just starting out, I was so mesmerized by its beauty and charisma that the bird itself became an obsession — I’ve been drawn to grouse ever since. In that one image, Jim introduced me to both grouse and the mission of the Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC).

The Missouri Conservationist has been connecting readers to the outdoors since 1938, but it was Jim who taught generations of Missourians how to truly see what was around them. When he joined the magazine as staff photographer in 1984, he brought a patience and an artistry that changed what people expected from a conservation photograph. Over the next 22 years, he built an impressive catalog of more than 100,000 images, expanding the magazine’s bird photography alone to cover over 270 species.

He set a standard at MDC that quietly became the reason someone like me could even dream of doing this work. When I was hired in early 2006, just before his retirement, I felt the weight of that immediately. I never thought of myself as his replacement. No one could replace Jim Rathert. What I could do, and what I’ve tried to do every day since, is follow in his footsteps: to keep pointing a camera at this state’s wild places and make people care for them.

Jim spent 36 years with MDC, starting in wildlife research in 1970 before finding his true calling behind the camera in 1984. He didn’t chase the photograph. He waited for it, sometimes for hours, tucked into a blind before dawn. That patience is in every frame he ever made. You can feel it.

Jim passed away on July 2. There will be a lot said about his career, his 100,000 images, his decades of covers and back pages. I think the truest way to honor him isn’t with a list of accomplishments but by doing the thing he loved most — loving and caring for nature, the way his images have always been a love letter to it.