NBC News | Watson Farms — Council Hill, Oklahoma

Client: NBC News | Year: 2021 | Location: Council Hill, Oklahoma | Credit: Christopher Creese for NBC News | Published: October 2, 2021

A Fourth-Generation Rancher Fighting Back Against Corporate Meatpacking

In the fall of 2021, Christopher Creese traveled to Council Hill, Oklahoma to photograph Damon Watson, a fourth-generation cattle rancher, for NBC News. The published feature, released October 2, examined how corporate consolidation was squeezing independent cattle ranchers out of profitability, and how some were fighting back by building their own small processing facilities. Creese's images, credited as Christopher Creese for NBC News, ran throughout the article documenting Watson's operation from the cattle to the storefront.

Grounding a National Policy Story in a Single Human Portrait

NBC News commissioned the assignment during the Biden administration's push to reform meatpacking regulations, a complex policy story about food supply chain vulnerability, rural livelihoods, and corporate power. The photography's job was to make that abstraction legible: to put a face and a place on a national economic argument. Creese photographed Watson, his family, the farm, and the newly opened processing facility, producing images that moved between environmental documentary and intimate portraiture.

Documentary Portraiture in a Working Agricultural Environment

A working cattle ranch in rural Oklahoma is not a controlled studio environment. The subjects are not available for extended direction. Light changes, animals move, weather shifts. Creese had to produce images that met NBC News' editorial standards for a major national feature, the kind of photographs that would run at the top of a high-traffic article, without imposing on a working operation or reducing a complex family's story to agricultural stock photography.

The Meatpacking Story Behind the Portrait

Corporate consolidation in the American meatpacking industry had, by 2021, left four companies controlling roughly 80% of beef processing, a level of market concentration that left independent ranchers with almost no pricing power. Watson's decision to build his own small processing facility was a direct response to this squeeze, and his story became emblematic of a broader national debate about food system reform. The NBC News feature ran as a national politics and policy story. CreeseWorks' photography gave the abstract economics of that story a specific, human face.