[Music]
RICK SMOLAN: There were two stories that I did as a photographer that were more than
just assignments for me.
That I got very emotionally involved in.
[Music]
The first was I was sent by TIME Magazine to take pictures of aborigines—to do a cover
stories about aborigines in the Outback so I went to Alice Springs right in the heart
of the Australian Outback.
I walked out of my hotel and the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life was washing
the windows of my hotel, so without thinking I lifted up my camera, took a few photographs
and she started screaming at me and said, y'know, put your damn cameras down.
Who the hell do you think you are?
I just said I'm sorry and she said, are you some kind of parasitic journalist down here
to take advantage of our poor aborigines?
I said, lady, I'm sorry.
I just excused myself and I left.
I met the young woman who was working for me and spent the day taking pictures and talking
to the aborigines and at the end of the day, the woman working for me said, what are you
doing tonight?
I said I'm going to go back and work on my captions and she said well a group of us who
work with aborigines are getting together for dinner at a friends house.
Would you like to come and meet some of the other local social workers?
So I said sure.
So I go to this address and knock on the door and of course who opens the door but the woman
who'd been washing the windows of my hotel.
I walked in the backyard and there were four camels tied up.
So I went back to my friend and said why does she have camels in the backyard?
And she said Robin is going to walk 2,000 miles alone with her camels and her dog Diggidy
from here through the Gibson desert out to the Indian Ocean.
At the end of the week, the woman working for me said I'd like to ask you a favor and
now she's a little embarrassed because she's been giving you so much grief.
And I said what's the favor.
She said she wants to write to National Geographic and ask if they would fund her trip and she
wants to use your name as a reference so I said sure.
So I got back to the States and got a letter from National Geographic who said we got a
letter from this woman who asked us to fund our trip.
It sounds really intriguing.
We're thinking of funding it, but y'know we don't want to have National Geographic's name
on someone who's gonna die out there.
Is she serious or is she like a nutcase?
I said she's very intense.
She's very focused.
I've seen her camels, I've seen her maps.
I said, well, since you guys are such good friends, would you like to be the photographer
to find her five times during the next nine months in the Outback.
So that turned into one of the most interesting assignments of my life.
She got lost.
She got attacked by herds of wild camels in the Outback.
She ran out of water.
It was just the most interesting year of my life as a photographer.
Every time I left, I thought I'd never see her again.
She was always kind of challenging me throughout the whole trip.
We had lots of conversations about what a journalist is and I was also trying to understand
what she was going out there.
At the end of the trip, she said to me are you going back to being parasite and prostitute
now.
I said, okay, what does that mean?
She said, well, okay, before my trip, somebody calls you up and says, okay go care about
aborigines for a week.
Go care about that for a week.
And she said I think my trip is the first time you've actually cared about anything
that somebody didn't tell you to care about so my question is are you going back to being
a photographer and waiting for someone else to tell you what to photograph or are you
going to try to use your talents as a photographer to try to affect the situation?
So it was sort of like go cover the head of the dragon so you can win the hand of the
princess.
I sort of felt this challenge to go off and try to prove myself maybe not to her but just
y'know, take what she said pretty seriously.
[Music]
So after Robin's trip, I was assigned by a magazine to photograph children who had been
fathered by American GIs and abandoned all over the world.
This was back in the '70s.
Late '70s.
Who were the offspring of y'know, love affairs and in the middle of doing this story about
these children, I met who a little girl who was 11 years old who had been fathered by
a GI.
She never met her father.
I spent a week with this girl and she was absolutely fascinating.
Just unlike most of the children I photographed, she didn't seem haunted or even though she
looked very, almost totally American to me, most of the kids, the more American you looked,
the more prejudiced you were against.
Kids would beat you up and ridicule you, make fun of you.
But this little girl seemed to be very confident, very popular with the other kids and at the
end of the week, I spent a week living with her and her grandmother, the grandmother started
crying the day that it was turn—it was my time to leave and I had a translator that
came back at the end of my week because I couldn't afford to have her there the whole
week and I asked what was happening and the translator started crying and said, okay,
I did something wrong here.
I said, tell me what's going on because I want to apologize and the translator said,
you didn't do anything wrong.
The grandmother thinks she's dying and she wants to know if you'll take Unsuk, her 11
year old granddaughter to America with you.
I said, look, can I get you a hospital?
Can I get you a doctor, why do you think you're dying?
And she just said I know that I'm dying.
I haven't told my granddaughter and I said if you're serious, I'll see if I can find
a friend—someone else in my world that has—y'know, that might be interested.
So I called my best friends.
They agreed to adopt her basically in the course of a phone call.
My friends flew to Korea.
The second night we were there, we woke up in a hotel that had caught on fire and we
were trapped in this room on the 11th floor with people jumping out of the windows below
us as the fire worked its way up the hotel.
I still have nightmares about it.
We finally got out about an hour into the fire so Natasha ended up living in an orphanage
for three months until all the paperwork went through and the fellow that ran the orphanage
had 75 children in this orphanage and said I have to talk to you about her.
I said, what's wrong?
He said just come in a minute and he closed the door and he said Natasha has been here
a week.
I have 75 children in this orphanage and three women and I have to take care of all these
kids.
It's total bedlam all the time.
He said she walked in, the second day she was here, she made up a list of all the older
children and assigned them to one of the younger children.
She walked in and told me that my room is messy and that I need to clean up the orphanage
more often and she's basically running the orphanage.
She's 11 years old.
She's been here a week.
He said I don't know who her mother was, but I've never met a child like this before.
He had this great story.
He said there's three kinds of children.
I've had hundreds of children come through the orphanage.
He said you've got children who are a glass.
Basically something terrible happens to them and they're just shattered.
You can never really put the pieces back together again.
Then you've got plastic kids where no matter what happens, it just bounces off of them.
And he said I've only met one other child like this, but I think of them like steel.
It's like the more adversity they go through, the stronger they get and he said this girl
Natasha, I can't wait to see what she does with her life because there's something—the
moment she wants in a room, the whole reorients itself around her.
The strangest part for me—this is a very short version of the story—is that Natasha's
now 43.
My children have sleepovers with her children.
Her kids are 6 and 8, my kids are 10 and 12.
Part of my brain still can't quite grasp what that means.
She's like my kid sister and those two stories, Robin's camel trip and Natasha's amazing journey,
y'know to coming to America and become the all-American kid—that sort of led me to
wanting to understand and control a little bit more of the final product which sort of
led to the idea of the Day in the Life books where at least a group of us as photographers
could control sort of the horizontal and the vertical to quote the old Twilight Zone episodes.
Hi, I'm Rick Smolan, please subscribe to THNKR!