Tyler Sharp calls it the Hemingway effect. If you're at a cocktail party in New York and someone asks what you do, and you say you film big-game hunting in Africa, the conversation is over. But if you say you work for a safari company that does Hemingway-style adventures — climbing Kilimanjaro, fishing, and doing a little hunting — suddenly it's the same thing, but the defenses don't go up. Sharp, a photographer and writer based in Dallas, Texas, had spent years documenting hunts and conservation efforts around the world, sitting in blinds made from thorn trees while lions investigated from inches away, and he kept running into the same problem: the people who cared most about wild animals and wild places were often hunters, but the way hunting was represented in media made that conversation impossible.
In 2017, he launched a Kickstarter for Modern Huntsman — a biannual publication that would change the presentation of hunting from the camo-and-kill-shot aesthetic of traditional outdoor media to something closer to an art book: thick matte stock, 200-plus pages, no advertisements, gallery-quality photography, and writing by hunters, conservationists, wildlife biologists, Indigenous land managers, and chefs who think seriously about what they do and why. The first print run of five thousand copies sold out in three months. Another five thousand were ordered immediately.
Contributors have included Jesse Griffiths — founder of Austin restaurant Dai Due, James Beard Award winner, Michelin Green Star holder — who wrote an entire chapter about panfish simply because Sharp asked him what he'd never done that he wanted to do. Volume eight was devoted to Africa. The writer Rick Bass and journalist Jamie Harrison contributed essays to the Modern Huntsman Cookbook. At $35 an issue with no ads, the publication operates on a model that most media advisors would call suicidal — yet it has built a community of 30,000 subscribers and expanded into films, podcasts, curated hunting experiences from the Texas Hill Country to the Scottish Highlands, and a partnership with Penguin Random House.
Sharp, who now lives in North Oak Cliff with his partner, the painter Fawcett, proposed with a tsavorite — a green garnet native to Tanzania, where he had spent so many nights under the stars. Modern Huntsman is the magazine that resulted from a simple observation: the hunting community's biggest problem was never the hunting. It was the storytelling. Fix the storytelling, and the conversation about conservation becomes possible.
Explore Modern Huntsman at <a href="https://modernhuntsman.com/" target="\_blank">modernhuntsman.com