[Music]
RICK SMOLAN: What makes really good photographers isn't necessarily the subject, it's their
perspective on the subject and that's why you can send a good journalist into almost
any situation and there's a great story there if you ask the right questions.
[Music]
I used to be a photographer for TIME and Life and National Geographic and lots of publications
around the world and I sort of think of myself as a photographic orchestra conductor.
I get to invite my heroes, my peers, and some young photographers and about every 18 months
I send them off on this sort of mission impossible assignment to sort of document and capture
the human face of emerging topics.
I think I've just always been fascinated by people—how people relate to each other.
I feel like I've spent most of my life, at least the first part of my life, observing
and watching other people.
One of the things that happens to you as a photographer is you get very emotionally involved
in things that you're photographing.
You want your pictures to not just document something.
You want your pictures to change—y'know to right a wrong or to expose a situation
that you hope other people will be shocked by if they saw your photographs.
But so often the pictures that showed up in the magazines tended to be the most predictable,
connect-the-dot photographs that editors back at home at a preconceived idea of what they
were looking for and if you came back with something different, they very often didn't
want to hear your opinion.
I was sitting in a bar with a group of photographers in Bangkok many years ago and I said, "Wouldn't
it be cool if we could invite our heroes and our friends and some young photographers and
all go to a country and do like a day in the life of that country.
Like one day, 24 hours, on your mark, get set, go."
It wasn't supposed to be the tourist attractions or the movie stars.
It was sort of extraordinary images of everyday life.
My friends, by the way, all said good, kid.
You go organize it and tell us when it's ready.
So I very naively, knowing nothing at all about book publishing went off and met with
about 35 publishers over the course of six months and got laughed out of their offices.
Every single publisher said what a stupid idea.
There's no market for coffee table books.
So out of desperation, I was living in Australia at the time, so the first book that I wanted
to do was a day in the life of Australia because I loved Australia so I went to the prime minister
of Australia who I had photographed a few times.
He liked photographers.
And I said, look, I want to do this book about your country I can't get any publisher to
back it.
Do you think maybe the Australian government would pay for all this?
And he said, nice idea.
But I will help you.
I'm going to set up meetings for you with Fortune 500 CEOs.
The head of Kodak Australia, the head of Qantas Australia, this guy Steve Jobs starting this
computer company.
I said, well, why do I want to meet with business people?
I'm trying to do a photo book.
And he said, okay, you want to ask Qantas for free airline tickets.
You want to ask Kodak for film.
You want to ask this guy Jobs for free computers.
And I said, they're just gonna give me all this stuff for free?
Like why?
He said, okay, you're gonna put their logo at the front of your book.
And I said no no, I can't do that!
I'm a journalist.
That would be selling out.
And he said, Rick, it's like a PBS documentary.
It's like the following program is brought to you by…
With a letter from the prime minister, I went out and knocked on doors and to my astonishment,
everybody not in publishing said, wow the best photographers in the world let loose?
A hundred of them for one day in Australia?
This is so cool!
So we didn't get much money, but we got airline tickets and film and hotels and computers
and we couldn't get it into any bookstores, so we had to sell it through newspapers and
it became the number one book in Australia.
The book was so successful that we started getting calls from the governor of Hawaii
saying it's our anniversary of statehood would you do us?
American Express invited us to come to Japan.
It's been quite an amazing sort of adventure.
We were allowed without being kind of a pervasive thing to look through the windows of our neighbors
and see how they lived.
I think everybody's intensely curious about each other.
How do I stack up?
How are things the same?
How are things different?
I remember when my daughter was 7, she went to a sleepover for the first time to the neighbors
down the street and she came back the next morning.
She survived her first sleepover and I said how was it?
She goes, dad, did you know that other people's lives are different than ours?
I said, yeah, I kinda had a suspicion, but what did you notice?
And she said, they let us eat breakfast for dinner.
I mean—and they go to bed at 9:30 instead of 8:30.
It was just really interesting because when you're a kid you think everyone's like you.
And then suddenly you find out, well, everybody does things a little bit differently.
So with these day in the life books and all the projects we've done, this idea of kid
of peering into other people's lives and being a fly on the wall, whatever the expression
is—ordinary, everyday life is kind of interesting if you understand the perspective of the person
who's observing.
Y'know, back to whether the old day in the life books would still be of interest today—now
they're kind of historical.
Now it's kind of fun to look back 20 or 30 years on some of these books and see what's
the same and what's different.
Some things are universal, some are obviously dated.
I think the other challenge for us with all these books is I always feel like we're walking
this interesting tight rope.
So if you do a country in a day, you want people who live in that country to go, wow,
I didn't know that.
But you also want people to come from outside the country to be surprised so you don't want
to bore the people inside the country by making it all tourist oriented.
It's sort of—it's interesting to people who know the country really well and people
who are seeing it for the first time.
Hi, I'm Rick Smolan.
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