A snapshot of Josh Hedges, the UFC’s man behind the lens
Twenty years ago, in the summer of 2000, Josh Hedges jumped in his car and drove a thousand miles north from Lubbock, Texas, to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to shoot his very first UFC event. Back then the sport still carried thematic tag lines to enhance the experience, and UFC 26 was dubbed the “Ultimate Field of Dreams.” It featured a heavyweight clash between Pedro Rizzo and Kevin Randleman, along with a host of Iowa’s finest: Matt Hughes, Jens Pulver and Pat Miletich.
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Hedges, who was a student at Texas Tech University studying math and computer science, was a fan. He had been following MMA since it was known as “NHB” and had been running his own forum website called ufighting.com, through which he got to know Charles Lewis Jr. and the guys over at Tapout. He volunteered to make the trek on his own dime to get a little experience, but more so to be part of the action.
It turned out to be a fortuitous trip. Eight months later, just before UFC 30 in Atlantic City, N.J., Zuffa purchased the UFC from Semaphore Entertainment Group, and the new brass needed a photographer. Lewis, whom he’d hung out with in Cedar Rapids, made some introductions.
“I had a very early website back in the day, which I’d ran since 1998,” Hedges told The Athletic while in Houston for UFC 247. “There was Sherdog and a couple others, and then I just started essentially what was a ‘blog’ back then, before we called them blogs. We had the USWF there in Lubbock and Amarillo, and I covered that. I met Evan Tanner through that, and Steve Nelson. So I kind of got connected a little bit from that and then just slowly started expanding and covering more regional stuff, like up in Colorado.
“Charles and Dan (Caldwell), they were the ones that introduced me to people at the UFC. Charles got me the interview with Dana and what was essentially my job interview in New Jersey. It was before UFC 31. I sat down in a ballroom with Dana White and Lorenzo Fertitta.”
Hedges worked a contractor for Randy Couture’s heavyweight showdown with Rizzo at UFC 31 at the Taj Mahal. He shot the next show, too, the one dubbed “UFC 32: Showdown in the Meadowlands,” which saw Tito Ortiz pummel Elvis Sinosic in the main event. By UFC 33, he was on staff as the UFC’s official still photographer.
“During my senior year at Texas Tech was when all the Silicon Valley dot-com-community bust started happening,” he says. “So I approached graduation thinking, ‘What the hell am I going to do?’ There weren’t any jobs available in what I knew, and I really didn’t want to go back to school to pursue my master’s in math and hope for a job teaching or something, though that was my backup plan. I felt like this just kind of fell in my lap, and obviously knowing the right people helped me get to that place.
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“And then with my first show being UFC 33 — you know, the whole debacle with the show running long and the main event getting cut off the pay-per-view — when we came back into work Monday morning, I was thinking, ‘Well, I’m moving back to Texas. This company is shutting down.’ We were already like, how are we going to make this work? We basically put all our eggs in this basket, and then that happened. We thought we were done.”
Turned out they weren’t done. Zuffa bounced back from the UFC 33 fiasco. It landed in Las Vegas by UFC 34, a major step forward for the promotion, and from there began to emerge from the taboo from which it was created. Hedges was there to shoot it every step of the way, from the salad days of Iowa to the ESPN era.
Millions of miles and shutter clicks later, he has traversed the globe documenting the UFC experience.
“I don’t think I ever had a vision of how massive it was going to become,” he says. “Back in the day, what you shot for was 100,000 or maybe 150,000 pay-per-views. I remember sitting down in the first meeting to talk about ‘The Ultimate Fighter,’ when the idea first came up. It was me and Dana, Joe Silva, Lorenzo, Craig Borsari, Sean Shelby and Beth Turnbull. That was the staff, and we were sitting there meeting in Dana’s office at like 7 or 8 o’clock at night. And Dana’s like, ‘OK, we may have this opportunity. What are your ideas? We need to come up with fighters.'”
Hedges, as he has been for most UFC fight nights and PPVs for the past 20 years from his fixed spot on the cage, was a fly on the wall.
“Dana was like, ‘I promise you, if everything happens perfectly and everything goes the way we want it to, this is going to work out so great for everybody. This is going to be so huge,'” Hedges said.
Who is Josh Hedges? You’ve seen his images a million times. With the UFC’s agreement with Getty, his photographs are the common visual link for most media outlets to whatever took place on fight night. He has seen more MMA than most people on Earth, and he can boast of having been closer to the action than anybody else on the planet as well. Unlike the thousands of storytellers who leave a live event with versions of what they saw, he is relied on for his ability to convey.
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He shot Stephan Bonnar’s fateful fight with Forrest Griffin in 2005 at the TUF 1 Finale. He shot B.J. Penn and Chuck Liddell and Couture. He was there for Anderson Silva’s debut, and has heard Nate Diaz yapping in the octagon since he started out in 2007. He was there to feel the cage shake when Brock Lesnar bull-rushed Heath Herring, and he captured Wanderlei Silva celebrating his 36-second KO win over Keith Jardine, when Silva sat on the fence howling at fans with veins as thick as cords popping out of his neck.
“When he jumped up on the cage, he just happened to be facing straight toward me,” Hedges says. “That was a big one. There was so much emotion, and in fact, there was always so much emotion with him. Win or lose, he was always great. That one stuck out in my head.”
Another one that has stuck with him over the years was at UFC 193, when Hedges and his crew rigged a remote camera above the action in Melbourne, Australia. That was the historic night Ronda Rousey got knocked out by Holly Holm to lose the bantamweight title, which Hedges captured from a bird’s-eye view with a fixed camera on the catwalk, similar to the classic Neil Leifer aerial shot from when Muhammad Ali knocked out Cleveland Williams.
“You do that camera, and so much work goes into putting it in, it’s amazing when it pays off,” he says. “We do it for a lot of our big fights, and it’s worked out maybe four or five times in all those times we’ve done it.”
As of UFC 247 in Houston, Hedges has lifetime status on United Airlines, having accumulated a million-and-a-half flying miles. He has been to Brazil 27 times, and Australia/New Zealand at least a dozen. He has visited Asia and Europe, and has horror stories about the jet lag he suffered on his first trip to Abu Dhabi. He has been to every state save for five, with the UFC not having yet gone to places such as Alaska and North Dakota.
“Funny enough, for as much as I fly, I hate to fly,” he says. “I kind of get myself worked up, and I try to upgrade myself whenever I can, but it doesn’t always work out.”
Over the years he has made friends with certain fighters, people such as Clay Guida, Yves Edwards and the late Tanner. He has quietly taken in the spectacles as they happen, always out of the way, and always clicking what it is he sees. He was there to see the milestone UFC 100 event, and then UFC 200. He was there for Jon Jones when his big toe was shooting off at a right angle from his foot in his title defense against Chael Sonnen. Although he’s a snapshot artist, whose job is to extract the essence of a single moment from the continuous flood of events on the historic record, he’s not immune to the thuds, the blood and the marvels of the game.
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“Every once in a while, there’ll be a really big fight that’s just like, yeah, I can’t wait to see that one,” he says. “Donald Cerrone and Conor McGregor (at UFC 246) was one of those for me. At the time, when McGregor fought Chad Mendes, it didn’t seem like it was just another big fight. But then when we got to the weigh-ins and when we started doing the rehearsals for fight night, it was like, ‘Wow this is something special here.’ And there have been so many of those moments.”
Hedges, whose official title is the UFC director of photography — and who now has a team of three to help with his workload in the era of nearly weekly events — is a UFC constant. If you don’t know, he’s the guy in the backward black hat. The black shirt. The black earrings and tattoos. He is part of the fabric of the live event, the general electricity of the production. Yet he is happily invisible at the same time. A breathing non-entity who wills himself to be looked past.
Sometimes he gets the perfect shot, as he did when Mark Hunt broke Stefan Struve’s jaw. Oftentimes he doesn’t, but he knows one of his favorite photographers — like Esther Lin or Ed Mulholland — probably did. Which is fine, because the big picture is all that concerns him.
“It’s like a presentation,” he says. “We’re all there to present the story. It’s not any kind of competition. At least not for me. I enjoy good photography just as much as the next, and there are so many times where it’s all about the angle, you know? I’m in a fixed position for the fights, and if they’re turned just slightly away from me, I have a terrible angle. But the person that’s shooting over here has a great angle, and you know somebody over there is going to get a good shot.”
Hedges is the quietest mainstay on the UFC’s roster, one of the few who predates White. A perfect fight week isn’t a fuss. It’s a transmission to the masses from ground zero, which is Hedges’ perch just above the cage wall. Like all human backdrops, his natural instinct is to downplay his involvement and to hopefully — if all goes as it should — have his abilities taken for granted.
“I feel like, for me, I don’t think of myself as an artist or as a storyteller,” he says. “Maybe that’s just the way I’ve always kind of looked at the different styles of photography. I don’t think of myself as being more like what the guys in fashion, or guys that shoot commercial stuff. I don’t really feel like I have that kind of brain that works that way.”
If he has one standout talent, it’s his ability to stay focused.
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“I have the hand/eye coordination, and I know a lot about the fights and anything that I shoot,” he says. “Every once in a while, you’ll try to do something artsy or whatever, more to experiment with something different. Sometimes it turns out, and sometimes it doesn’t.”
It’s all come full circle for Hedges. Having settled back in Lubbock for the past five years, he prefers to drive his RV to the fights whenever he can. Driving out to Houston for UFC 247 was an easy daylong trek. The road has become a way of a life. He took his wife and 9-year old twins with him to San Antonio when the UFC last visited there, and he likes to stay in that RV on the road rather than in the fighter hotel.
“This is our first year doing the home-schooling, so the plan is as we get more into it, is that we just kind of live on the road and go from town to town to town,” he says. “Along the way, I can get assignments or whatever. It hasn’t quite got there yet.”
The next actual road trip he’s planning is for Anthony Smith’s fight with Glover Teixeira in April, which is out in Nebraska. Another journey into the cornfields that started it all. Who could have thought that driving out to Iowa back in the day, for a show called “UFC 26: Ultimate Field of Dreams,” would open up so much interstate? Hedges didn’t. But in a weird way, when he looks back over his expanse of 20 years covering this sport, that first show kind of lived up to billing for the UFC’s unsung still photographer.
He found the field that was right for him.
“And it really has been a dream gig,” he says.
(Top photo: Jeff Bottari / Zuffa)
