Rick Smolan: Creative InspirationsIntroduction| 00:00 | (Music playing.)
| | 00:06 | I don't think of myself as a book
publisher. I like to take myself as sort of a
| | 00:09 | photo entrepreneur. I mean,
my orientation is photography and storytelling.
| | 00:15 | I actually like being scared. I like
being in over my head. It makes me feel more
| | 00:19 | alive. I think you find out lot about
yourself when you're under pressure and
| | 00:24 | when things are going
smoothly, I'm pretty bored.
| | 00:27 | I always say that doing these books
feels a little bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle,
| | 00:30 | but you lost the box that all
the pieces came in. So we don't know what
| | 00:34 | this is supposed to look like.
| | 00:37 | You really wanted your
pictures to change the world.
| | 00:39 | You really hoped that you would
just blow the lid off some situation or
| | 00:43 | shock people or that your pictures
would actually have some effect other than
| | 00:46 | serve the purpose of selling ads.
| | 00:48 | TIME Magazine is just like-- I didn't do
anything. It's not like I'm not working
| | 00:54 | people. I'm not trying to sell myself.
I'm a shy guy who likes taking pictures,
| | 00:59 | but people seem to just keep adopting me.
| | 01:01 | A lot of our projects
shouldn't actually work.
| | 01:04 | We're usually ahead of the curve,
both from the technology point
| | 01:08 | of view and also from
the money part of the curve.
| | 01:10 | I get so high when I shoot.
| | 01:12 | I miss it terribly. I don't miss the
editors and I don't miss not seeing the
| | 01:17 | pictures used that I think should
have been used, but I miss the feeling of
| | 01:22 | faith and life just happening in front of you.
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| Workspace| 00:00 | (Music plays.)
| | 00:08 | Welcome to Against All Odds
Productions. We are in slightly overcast
| | 00:12 | Sausalito, California, just over the
Golden Gate Bridge and this is a small
| | 00:17 | apartment that we've turned into our
production office and usually in this
| | 00:21 | apartment, there is two or three of us.
Sometimes we are 500 or a thousand people
| | 00:25 | around the world. We're sort of
like a little movie production company.
| | 00:27 | So we started real small. I'll come up with
an idea and then hire each of the different
| | 00:30 | people and teams that we need for the
projects that we are passing the torch along.
| | 00:35 | So I will invite you into our
luxurious space here. We are working on a very
| | 00:40 | exciting project, probably the most--
I don't think I've ever had so much fun
| | 00:43 | coming to work everyday. We are
working on a project called the Obama Time Capsule,
| | 00:47 | and it's a pretty simple idea.
A lot of people have been doing books
| | 00:51 | about Obama. It's a very inspiring
story and we thought, what if we came with
| | 00:55 | this from a different direction?
Instead of the typical publisher's approach
| | 01:00 | which is do a book, get it out fast,
print that as cheaply as possible, throw a
| | 01:04 | bunch of pictures in it, and people will
buy it because it has Obama's name on it.
| | 01:07 | Our thought was let's go back over
and look at all the pictures taken by
| | 01:11 | thousands of photographers over the
last two years, find those special pictures,
| | 01:16 | a lot of which never had saw the
light of day. As a former Time and Life and
| | 01:21 | National Geographic photographer,
I was always frustrated. I never felt that
| | 01:24 | a lot of these editors used the best
pictures and I realize their job wasn't to
| | 01:28 | give Rick Smolan a portfolio.
| | 01:30 | But I often thought that a lot of
pictures that I saw, then published,
| | 01:33 | were the ones you would have expected to see
before you ever sent me out to shoot and
| | 01:37 | so often photographers come back
with great images that are iconic and
| | 01:40 | symbolic and intriguing, and a lot
of those never make their way into the
| | 01:45 | newspaper or the magazine, because
it's not the way the magazine thinks.
| | 01:47 | They are not really-- they only
want to give the audience what they are
| | 01:50 | expecting to see.
| | 01:52 | This Obama Time Capsule does a couple
of things. First of all, it goes back
| | 01:56 | over the last two years. It showcases
wonderful photography and in addition to
| | 02:00 | that we found a way to allow every single
person who buys the book, and I am not kidding,
| | 02:05 | every single person, to personalize
the book. It's fun when you are
| | 02:08 | doing something impossible and
everyone's trying to help you make that dream
| | 02:12 | come to life. So I will
continue with the tour here.
| | 02:15 | Caroline is working back here. Caroline
Cortizo is from England and she worked
| | 02:20 | with us last year on UK at Home and
she is a Photoshop expert, she is an image
| | 02:24 | management expert, she is a
database queen and when we want to find a photograph,
| | 02:31 | we always-- Caroline has this--
I am scared to think of what's
| | 02:33 | going on your brain most of the time.
But all you have to do is mention a picture,
| | 02:37 | one picture out of like 10,000
that we have looked at the last week
| | 02:40 | and she can take exactly where it
is and find it within seconds on her computer.
| | 02:44 | We have a young guy name Topher who
is in France, who is doing a lot of our
| | 02:48 | remote programing for our image
management sort of tools here. Parisa Moorhead
| | 02:54 | runs the office, keeps all the
trains running on time. Katya Able in the back
| | 03:01 | is the person that actually runs the
entire company. She is our Chief Operating Officer.
| | 03:05 | As you can see, we are pretty much a
Mac shop here. We've got some other
| | 03:11 | machines around, but it's mostly Mac as
most people in photography design tend to
| | 03:16 | rely on Macs for all their tools.
So we use InDesign, we use Photoshop, we use
| | 03:20 | Acrobat. We are using InDesign Server
for this project which allows us to do
| | 03:24 | a lot of the customization.
| | 03:26 | A lot of these boards,
when we have pictures we want to consider,
| | 03:29 | we put them on these boards and so we
have got, this is more here, but this is
| | 03:33 | the last chapter of the book which
is The First 100 Days of the Obama Administration
| | 03:37 | and since we haven't gotten there yet,
we continue to collect pictures.
| | 03:41 | So if you look back over here,
on the side-- the boards that
| | 03:44 | you saw at the beginning are actually
the book laid out, but all the book,
| | 03:47 | all the pictures that we are
considering for the book are up on these big boards.
| | 03:51 | And there was a time we couldn't
Prisa for last two weeks because
| | 03:54 | the boards were blocking her. We had to
throw food over to feed her behind the cage.
| | 03:59 | This cover is not right. It's
still a little stretched but basically,
| | 04:02 | it's a big thick coffee table book and
beautifully printed and again, it looks
| | 04:08 | like something that you'd get in a
bookstore and that's we're aiming for,
| | 04:12 | so it's indistinguishable, except it
just happens to have your name on it
| | 04:15 | and your picture is in it.
| | 04:16 | We are calling this a Time Capsule
because we think it's the kind of thing that
| | 04:20 | people who want to leave their great
grandchildren. My mother actually kept a
| | 04:23 | book of J.F.K., The First 100 Days,
and she would stick pictures of like
| | 04:28 | what we were doing and our artwork
from school and my third grade report card,
| | 04:35 | or whatever grade I was at that
time. And it's funny because she sort of
| | 04:39 | feels like this was her idea and
just always tell your mother she is right.
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| Becoming a photographer| 00:08 | I had to get away from my parents when
I was 14. I was ready to leave the nest
| | 00:13 | probably earlier than a lot of kids.
Every opportunity I could, I hopped in a
| | 00:17 | bus and go to New York City and just
wander around. My dad gave me a camera and
| | 00:21 | my history professor told me that he
was going to go South America for the
| | 00:25 | entire summer and he is going to take
two students with him. So, I convinced my parents
| | 00:29 | to let me go with this guy and
so I spent three months traveling
| | 00:32 | throughout South America at the age of
14 with this crazy history professor.
| | 00:37 | It was an amazing experience. We went
to every single country. I had a little
| | 00:41 | reporter S Minolta camera that took 72
frames on a roll of 36 pictures. It was
| | 00:48 | very economical. And I just fell in
love with photography and that's --
| | 00:51 | I didn't know what being a photographer
meant, but that's all I wanted to do from
| | 00:54 | the age of 14.
| | 00:56 | My father was actually adamant about
me not being a photographer. It's very
| | 00:59 | interesting when it was time to go to
college of course I wanted to apply to --
| | 01:02 | I didn't want to college. I just wanted
to be a photographer, whatever that was,
| | 01:05 | and my Dad insisted one, that I go to
college, which I thought was a complete
| | 01:10 | waste of time before I went.
| | 01:11 | And two he made sure that I went to
college that did not have a photography
| | 01:14 | program. I didn't know at that time he
had been a photographer in World War II.
| | 01:17 | He never mentioned it once, despite my
complete fascination with photography.
| | 01:22 | It turned out my father had thought
that if he had told me if he was a
| | 01:25 | photographer, since I was really
interested in photography, then it would have
| | 01:28 | been encouraging me. 'Well you did it.'
I created my own major in college and
| | 01:32 | I convinced my art professor, let me
create a photography major, which didn't exist.
| | 01:37 | At my college art professor who let me
do all this, one day he said, I have a
| | 01:41 | friend in Tennessee who is the
Director of Photography in a newspaper and
| | 01:44 | he and his wife Helen run this little
photo agency called Image. And I said
| | 01:48 | what's a photo agency? He said, well like
you send them pictures you have taken and
| | 01:52 | they sell them. Well, so I put a box
of my pictures that I'd shot for the yearbook.
| | 01:56 | I printed them, put a hundred
pictures in the box, scribbled my name on
| | 02:00 | the back and sent them to this guy and
two weeks later he sent me a check for
| | 02:02 | like $3,000. This is like 1972.
That would be like $20,000 today.
| | 02:08 | Jack one day said, what you are
going to do when you get out of college?
| | 02:11 | And I said, be a photographer. He said,
well how you are going to do that? He said,
| | 02:15 | what do you have, you have a portfolio?
I said, no. Okay, and I never met this guy.
| | 02:19 | I only talked with him on the phone
for years and so he said look, a friend of
| | 02:23 | mine is a Director of Photography at
Time magazine. His name is Jack Durniak
| | 02:27 | and if you want I will set an
appointment for you. So, I went up to
| | 02:31 | New York City with my yearbook under my
arm and my little portfolio and John gave me
| | 02:37 | an assignment literally on the spot
and it turned out that John was always
| | 02:40 | looking for one young
hungry photographer every year.
| | 02:43 | And so I didn't know this, but I was
sort of anointed as the young hungry
| | 02:47 | photographer and so John started
giving me all the assignments no one else
| | 02:50 | wanted to do which I didn't care about.
Then the third assignment I got was,
| | 02:54 | I didn't realize that it was kind of a
booby trap assignment. There was a woman
| | 02:58 | named Sarah Caldwell who was a famous
opera impresario and she is a really
| | 03:05 | interesting woman. Very powerful, big,
sturdy stocky woman and I didn't know,
| | 03:10 | but she had a reputation for
eating photographers alive.
| | 03:12 | She hated photographers.
| | 03:14 | All week Doug Kirkland offered to teach me
how to light, how to shoot color, and so did
| | 03:19 | David Burnett and I kept saying, okay,
well tomorrow we will get together.
| | 03:22 | I think I was like in denial. I was like
so scared I didn't want to think about it.
| | 03:27 | So instead of like going to
Doug Kirkland, one of the greatest
| | 03:30 | photographers in the world who offered
to teach me how to light, I just never
| | 03:33 | got around to it.
| | 03:34 | So I took up train up to Boston.
I went to her house. Somehow I thought
| | 03:36 | I would take her outside and shoot in
open shade and it will all be fine and
| | 03:40 | of course, the day I got up there, it was
pissing with rain, dark, dismal Boston,
| | 03:44 | a horrible, gloomy, wintery
day. This is in late October.
| | 03:49 | And I go into her house and her
mother is in a wheel chair. She is really
| | 03:53 | unhappy that I am there. I could tell
it just like, "take your pictures and get
| | 03:56 | out of here" and she was like
really unhappy to have me or any other
| | 03:59 | photographer there. And I had not
brought any lights. I didn't know how to light and
| | 04:05 | just as I am as about to sort of say
thank you, knowing I'd shot these horrible,
| | 04:09 | blurry, globby, dark miserable
photographs, there is just a loud knock on the door
| | 04:14 | and there is a CBS film crew
that's come to do a documentary about her.
| | 04:18 | And they walk into the house and
they light the entire house. I mean
| | 04:20 | they literally lit the whole house like it
was a movie set. And so I kind of slunk
| | 04:25 | into the background hoping she wouldn't
notice that I was still there and started
| | 04:28 | shooting over their shoulders and
they lit it-- it was amazing. These guys
| | 04:32 | really, they were just--
they just descended on this poor woman.
| | 04:37 | So they left. And I am still sitting in
the corner and shocked that like,
| | 04:41 | thank you God, how did this happen.
| | 04:44 | Her phone rings and she gets on the
phone and so it's a limousine service
| | 04:47 | telling her they couldn't pick her up
and take her to New Hampshire the next
| | 04:50 | day for rehearsal. So, I said, could I
be your limo driver? Could I like --
| | 04:55 | I will rent a car and I will drive you
to New Hampshire and I will be your
| | 04:58 | servant for the next day or two and I
will just hang out. I'll be quiet, I won't say
| | 05:01 | anything. And she smiled and said,
I have always wanted-- I love that Beatles song,
| | 05:06 | 'Baby You Can Drive My Car.'
She said, you are going to be my limo driver,
| | 05:09 | like a Time Magazine photographer is
going to drive my car? I said, yes.
| | 05:12 | So I rented a car and drove her to
New Hampshire. I had pictures of her asleep.
| | 05:17 | I basically just became part
of her life and I stayed for a week.
| | 05:22 | And at the end of the week she said,
she was going to Mexico to start the
| | 05:26 | development of a new opera. And she
invited me to go with her. So,
| | 05:30 | Time Magazine at this point is like beyond
ecstatic. I mean this little punk kid who
| | 05:34 | is being thrown out in the lake who
should have drowned, suddenly the women
| | 05:38 | who is supposed to eat me alive, now I am
her limo driver and I am flying to Mexico with her.
| | 05:43 | So, it was the cover of Time Magazine.
Time was thrilled. So many times I have
| | 05:49 | been sort of just about to-- basically
the parachute is not going to open and
| | 05:53 | then something happens at the last
minute that saves it and turns it in a much
| | 05:57 | better than-- if I would have known how to light,
I would have taken the pictures and left.
| | 06:01 | I still look back and I pinch myself
because I think if that CBS film crew
| | 06:05 | hadn't knocked on the door at that
moment, I always wonder if my life would have
| | 06:08 | gone in completely other direction.
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| Opportunities down under| 00:00 | (Music playing.)
| | 00:08 | Basically the assignment that I was
given was to photograph the first non-stop
| | 00:12 | Pan Am flight to Japan and it was an
assignment no one wanted to do because it
| | 00:16 | was a press junket. Basically you get
on the plane, fly to Japan, take pictures
| | 00:19 | of guys shaking hands, get back on
the plane and come home. So, what
| | 00:22 | photographer would want to do that? But
it was like "me! I'll go." Japan, never been to Asia.
| | 00:27 | So, I went over there and Time
Magazine one day called up and said
| | 00:32 | the Prime Minister of Australia is coming to
Japan on a tour and then he is going to China.
| | 00:36 | Would you like to go to China
with him? So, I spent a week with the
| | 00:40 | Prime Minister and I had hair down to
here. I was like a real hippy at the time.
| | 00:43 | I had love beads and leather
bands and all the Australians wear these
| | 00:47 | very close, short, professional looking
journalists. One day we were talking,
| | 00:52 | he has had one of his guards come get me
and take me back to his car. We were
| | 00:56 | in the bullet train in Japan.
Then I said, "Oh God! What did I do?"
| | 01:00 | The guards were coming to get me and he
said "Sit down." I sit there. "Nice to meet you."
| | 01:04 | He said "So, do you prefer
the 24 or the 35 on the Nikon, because I
| | 01:09 | am trying to decide whether I should
zoom or..." It turned out he was a total
| | 01:11 | photography nut. So he invited me to
come to Australia and said the government
| | 01:16 | had a program to bring journalists to
Australia. He invited me to his home.
| | 01:19 | He said "Could you do like Christmas card?"
| | 01:21 | So, again Time Magazine was just like--
I didn't do anything. It's not like I am
| | 01:27 | not working with people. I am not
trying to sell myself. I am shy guy who likes
| | 01:31 | to taking pictures, but people seemed
to just keep adopting me and then Time said,
| | 01:36 | "Well, now that you are in Australia,
would you like to do a story about aborigines?"
| | 01:39 | So, I go to the outback
of Australia. I check into my hotel.
| | 01:44 | I walk out of the hotel on the way to
meet a social worker who is going to take me
| | 01:47 | to the aboriginal camps to get
permission to take pictures of the aborigines
| | 01:51 | and the most beautiful woman I had ever
seen in my life is washing the windows
| | 01:55 | of my hotel, wrapped in very tight sarong.
| | 01:58 | So I take my camera out. I get off two
or three frames and she turns around and
| | 02:04 | she start screaming at me and telling
me what I can do with my cameras and
| | 02:08 | "What are you, some kind of a
journalist?" and I said, "Yeah," and she said
| | 02:12 | "You are probably here to photograph
our aborigines, right? You are going to
| | 02:15 | take advantage of these poor people
and take pictures of them" and I said
| | 02:18 | "Excuse me, I am really late. I am
really sorry. I didn't mean to offend you"
| | 02:23 | and I left.
| | 02:24 | So I worked all day with a social
worker, nice young woman and she said
| | 02:28 | "Some friends of mine are having a party
tonight in town, would you like to meet
| | 02:31 | other people that work with aborigines?"
and I said "I would love to." So she
| | 02:34 | gave me the address and I got my rental car
and drive to this little house way in to the town
| | 02:38 | and I knock on the door, who
opens the door but the woman in the sarong.
| | 02:41 | She said "Put your cameras down, you
can't any pictures of my friends"
| | 02:44 | and I said "Okay."
| | 02:46 | So I walk into the backyard and there
were four camels tied up in her backyard
| | 02:51 | and I said to Robin, the girl who
had been so unpleasant, what's with the camels?
| | 02:55 | "None of your business" and
apparently I learned that Robin had been
| | 02:59 | planning for two years to walk across
the outback of Australia with these four camels
| | 03:03 | and her dog Diggedy and I said
"Why?" and they all said, "We don't know,
| | 03:08 | she is like obsessed with this idea."
So, throughout the week I kept running
| | 03:11 | into Jane or Robin and finally Jane
came up and said "Look, Robin wants to ask
| | 03:15 | you a favor, but she is too embarrassed
because she is been giving you such a hard time"
| | 03:18 | and I said, "What is the favor?"
| | 03:19 | She said, "Well, she wants to write to
National Geographic and ask would they
| | 03:22 | would fund a trip that she wants to
do through the outback and she thought
| | 03:27 | maybe you could like introduce her
to somebody at National Geographic."
| | 03:29 | And I said, "Well, I have met the editors,
I know some people there, but I have never
| | 03:32 | worked for them," she said
"Feel free to use my name."
| | 03:35 | So I finally ended up going back to the
United States. I have been away for 11 months
| | 03:39 | and I was home in about a
week and I got a call from Bob Gilka at
| | 03:42 | National Geographic, who is the
director of photography, and he said
| | 03:45 | "We got a letter from this woman in Australia,
is she like a nut-case or is she serious?
| | 03:50 | I mean is she going to die out there.
If we fund her trip, is this going to be
| | 03:53 | an embarrassment for us or do you
think she knows what she is doing?"
| | 03:56 | I said, "She is very intense, I saw
her maps, I saw her camels, she is very fierce.
| | 04:01 | She seems to have done her homework.
I think maybe worth it," And he said,
| | 04:06 | "Well, since you guys are such
good friends, would you like to be the
| | 04:09 | photographer to go and document her trip?"
So, suddenly I am on this adventure,
| | 04:16 | which went on for nine months. So,
I flew back to Australia, I met with her and
| | 04:20 | Bob Gilka, they agreed to give her
$6000 to fund the trip. So, six times during
| | 04:26 | the year, I had to fly out
and find her in the outback.
| | 04:29 | It was a very interesting year.
I think I grew up a lot during the year.
| | 04:33 | I think I took some of the best
photographs I have ever taken. She hated my
| | 04:36 | pictures. She said I made her look
beautiful. She hated that. The story became
| | 04:40 | for a while I think one of the most
popular stories in the history on National
| | 04:43 | Geographic. It was a cover story.
She hated the cover story, she hated the
| | 04:46 | article and I kept saying that "If you
hate it so much, you should write your own book."
| | 04:51 | She said "Again, you're
always trying to cash in that stuff."
| | 04:54 | Then two years later she called me up
and said, "You are not going to believe this,
| | 04:58 | but I have written a book."
I said "You are kidding me," and she said
| | 05:02 | "I want you to read it, because some of
that has to do with you and what happened to
| | 05:05 | us out there and how hard I was on you."
So I read the book and it was hard on me,
| | 05:11 | but it was honest and she never
kept a notebook. She never wrote anything down,
| | 05:15 | didn't have a tape recorder.
| | 05:16 | She wrote the book, but she could
remember the patterns that a bug made in
| | 05:20 | the sand. There was no compression.
Most people's memories get compressed with time
| | 05:24 | so they only remember the highlights
but she wrote the book as if she was
| | 05:27 | almost like it was in real time. It's
unbelievable, her ability to capture and
| | 05:33 | recreate her memories and her
feelings. The book was extraordinary.
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| Breaking with the system| 00:00 | (Music playing.)
| | 00:09 | I just stayed in Asia for about five
years and I was very lucky to continue
| | 00:15 | having this sort of little twist
that fate and in between lots of other
| | 00:18 | projects, I'd always find things I
want to work on on my own. Time Magazine
| | 00:23 | sent me to do a three-day assignment
about children who had been fathered by
| | 00:26 | GIs in Southeast Asia and it was a
horrible situation. 40,000 children
| | 00:33 | fathered by GIs and abandoned.
| | 00:35 | Local government said these are the
children of Americans and the American
| | 00:38 | government said these are the children
of prostitutes. In some cases, the women
| | 00:41 | weren't prostitutes. In some cases they
were, but these poor kids were lost in
| | 00:45 | this limbo. The more American they
look, the more hated they were,
| | 00:48 | the more they were beaten up and ridiculed
and the more miserable their lives were.
| | 00:54 | So I decided after the Time Magazine
assignment of the Amerasians, I would take
| | 00:57 | six months off and find six children in
six different countries and go between
| | 01:02 | the children and see instead of sort
of just documenting something, I could
| | 01:05 | actually affect it with my photography.
| | 01:07 | I think a lot of photographers have
that feeling that you don't want to just be
| | 01:11 | filling the pages of magazines and
doing connect the dot photographs, but
| | 01:14 | you want to feel like you could
expose something or shock people or tell a story
| | 01:19 | that would make people want
to do something about what you are photographing.
| | 01:22 | So, I found kids in different countries.
I was photographing them. I heard in
| | 01:27 | Korea through the Pearl Buck
Foundation that there was a little girl that was
| | 01:32 | being raised by her grandmother up on
the DMZ between North and South Korea,
| | 01:35 | that being raised by her
grandmother and the grandmother never let any
| | 01:38 | westerners see this girl. We went to
the village. The social worker went and met
| | 01:43 | with the grandmother and came out
shaking her head, and she said,
| | 01:45 | "I don't understand."
And I said "What?"
| | 01:47 | She said, "She has agreed to speak with
you and she has agreed to let you meet
| | 01:50 | her granddaughter" and she said "This
is like the 20th time I have come to her
| | 01:55 | with a request like this and I don't
understand why." I hadn't even met the
| | 01:58 | grandmother, so I have nothing to
do with this decision. So I met the
| | 02:01 | grandmother. The girl was just amazing.
| | 02:03 | She looked 98% American. Freckles,
blue eyes, just absolutely gorgeous, cute,
| | 02:10 | and funny, and the strangest part
about is I could tell that even though
| | 02:13 | I didn't speak Korean, that she didn't
have that haunted concentration camp look.
| | 02:18 | All the other kids are going to hunched
over and their eyes were kind of sunken in
| | 02:21 | and you can tell they were like
skittish animals that were ready to be attacked.
| | 02:25 | This girl kind of walked in the room
and made her presence felt and the affection
| | 02:29 | between her and the grandmother was
just amazing. At the end of doing the story,
| | 02:33 | I wanted to publish a story
about Amerasian children. I took all the
| | 02:37 | pictures of Natasha out of it, but
I went to magazines all over the United States
| | 02:40 | and got turned down by every
single publications. They said Americans don't
| | 02:43 | want to hear about illegitimate
children of American GIs. There is no market
| | 02:47 | for that story here.
| | 02:49 | So I finally found a magazine called
GEO, a German magazine which was for a
| | 02:52 | while publishing here much like
National Geographic and they laid out this
| | 02:57 | really powerful story, cover story,
really disturbing pictures. I went to the
| | 03:01 | whorehouses with the GIs, I went with
the kids, I went with the mothers,
| | 03:05 | I found adopted families.
| | 03:06 | It was the best story I ever shot
and just before it went to press,
| | 03:10 | the Director of Photography called me to
go over some of the captions for some of
| | 03:13 | the pictures and I realized that she
hadn't mentioned like the four most powerful
| | 03:17 | pictures in the article, including
the cover and I said, "Alice,
| | 03:21 | what about this picture and that
picture and this one and this one?"
| | 03:24 | There was this long silence on the phone.
She said "Well, actually our editors
| | 03:28 | were here from Germany last week and
we decided to drop those pictures."
| | 03:33 | I said "what do you mean? Those were the
pictures that grabbed you by the gut and
| | 03:38 | didn't let go. I mean those were the
ones that wouldn't let you walk away after
| | 03:42 | seeing those pictures," and she said,
"Well, our advertising hasn't been going
| | 03:46 | very well and our editors are afraid
that they will offend the advertisers."
| | 03:50 | I said "Wait, wait, wait, if you run
the story without those pictures,
| | 03:53 | you have run the same lame, limp watered down
story that every other person that has ever
| | 03:57 | done the story has done and now I
can't place the story anywhere else because
| | 04:02 | now GEO has published it." I said
"Well, then I want my name taken off the story."
| | 04:05 | She said, "Rick, you spent a year working
on the story. I mean it's just as powerful."
| | 04:11 | So I wrote this long, long telex to
the editor explaining why, how they were
| | 04:17 | sabotaging these kids and
betraying their trust, and I got this very
| | 04:21 | condescending note back saying "You've
got way too emotionally involved in the
| | 04:24 | story, and our story is just as
powerful as it was with the other pictures."
| | 04:27 | So they ran the story without my name on it
and basically that was the last story I ever shot.
| | 04:32 | I just stopped shooting. I was so angry.
I was so disappointed and I felt so
| | 04:38 | much like I'll never-- I needed
to learn how to take control of the
| | 04:43 | machine because if I was always at
the mercy of some editor and some
| | 04:46 | advertising department, then I was just
a cog in the machine and I would never
| | 04:51 | have any control of the finished
product. So that sort of planted the seed in
| | 04:54 | my mind that I needed to figure how to do
my own projects and publish them myself.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| A Day in the Life of Australia| 00:00 | (Music plays.)
| | 00:09 | Being in Asia for so many years and
being with so many photographers, one of
| | 00:12 | things that surprise me so much was that
the same men and women tended to show up
| | 00:16 | at all the big events. I would sit
around the bars with these men and women
| | 00:21 | and a lot of it was in Bangkok. There
would always be a new place we would all go
| | 00:23 | to in between that was inexpensive,
it was fun, it was warm, and these other
| | 00:28 | photographers many of whom were my
heroes would sit around and do nothing but
| | 00:31 | bitch and moan and complain.
| | 00:33 | What was happening is we would all,
all of the photographers, get very
| | 00:36 | emotionally involved with the things
they were shooting. And you really wanted
| | 00:39 | your pictures to change the world.
You really hoped that you would just blow
| | 00:42 | the lid off some situation, or shock
people, or that your pictures would
| | 00:45 | actually have some effect other than
serve the purpose of selling ads in a
| | 00:49 | magazine. And so I am sitting around
in a bar with Philip Jones Griffith
| | 00:53 | and JP Laffont, a bunch of people, and I said,
wouldn't be cool if we could all get together,
| | 00:58 | all of us, and descend on a country for 24
hours. Like just cover, blanket, the country,
| | 01:04 | and all go. On your mark, set, go.
It's midnight. We all start shooting,
| | 01:07 | and we do a book in one day.
| | 01:08 | So all my friends in Bangkok that night
said, "great, you go organize it and
| | 01:12 | we'll all come take pictures," thinking that
would be the last of it. So I went back to
| | 01:16 | Australia. I went to publishers.
I went to 35 publishers around the world
| | 01:20 | thinking they would fall over at
the brilliance of this idea.
| | 01:24 | The best photographers in the world let
loose for 24 hours, A Day in the Life of Australia,
| | 01:27 | and got laughed out of
their offices. Every single publisher,
| | 01:31 | 35 publishers I met with, said "who on
earth would pay $40 for a book of pictures
| | 01:37 | taken on a day that nothing happens in
some God forsaken country, on the other
| | 01:40 | side of the world like
Australia. Who would care about that?"
| | 01:43 | So I went back to my friend the Prime
Minister and I said "Mr. Prime Minister,
| | 01:47 | I want to do this book about your country.
I went to all these publishers. No one
| | 01:51 | is interested. Could you like pay to
bring all my friends to Australia for this project?"
| | 01:55 | And he said, "Nice try."
But he said "I will help you," and I thought
| | 01:58 | you know, it will be one of these
shining me on, polite kind of things.
| | 02:01 | He said, "okay. First I am going to
give you a letter saying I know you,
| | 02:04 | respect you, admire your work."
I said, "yes, so what I do with the letter?"
| | 02:09 | He said, "okay, just stick with me
here okay. I have a good idea for you."
| | 02:12 | And then he outlined what I have been doing for
the last 25 years, in the next like 10 seconds.
| | 02:17 | He said "okay, I am going to
set up meetings for you with the CEOs of
| | 02:20 | companies all over Australia."
I said, "and how is that going to help me?"
| | 02:24 | He said, "okay, you are going to tell them
that you are producing the Olympics of photography."
| | 02:29 | I said, "okay, I am sorry.
I am really stupid. I still don't get it."
| | 02:33 | "You are doing an Olympics of
photography. You are the bringing the best
| | 02:36 | photographs in the world to Australia
and it's a huge competition to see who
| | 02:39 | can get the best pictures in your book."
I said, "well, it's not a competition,
| | 02:42 | it's a collaboration." He says,
"Rick, I have been around you guys. You're all
| | 02:45 | trying to outdo each other. It's
definitely a competition." I said,
| | 02:49 | "so what I am asking these companies for?"
He said, "okay, you are going to Kodak you are
| | 02:53 | asking them for film, you are going to
Qantas you are asking them for airline tickets,
| | 02:56 | you are Hertz asking them for cars,
you are going The Hyatt and ask them for rooms.
| | 02:59 | This guy Steve Jobs has started this
computer company. You can ask him for computers."
| | 03:03 | And I said, "and why would
they give me this stuff?" He is like,
| | 03:07 | I remember him being completely
exasperated with me. He said, "okay you are going
| | 03:09 | to put their logo in the front of page
of your book. You are going to give them
| | 03:12 | a special edition of the book with a
letter that the Chairman can write.
| | 03:15 | You are going to talk about them
when you go on the Today show."
| | 03:18 | I said, "I am going on the Today Show?"
I am like totally shy still at this point.
| | 03:22 | He said, this is a really exciting
idea and all of companies are going to--"
| | 03:27 | He said, "it may be hard to do it,
but I think with my letter and
| | 03:30 | my introductions and you show them the
cover of National Geographic that you just did
| | 03:34 | and you show them your covers of Time."
| | 03:36 | So I went out there and I met with
almost 600 companies. It took two years.
| | 03:40 | I was sleeping on a sleeping bag in my
friend's apartment in Melbourne. I stopped
| | 03:44 | shooting photographs and I just--
it was a great lesson in rejection.
| | 03:49 | And six companies out of 400 said okay.
But we got 100 first class round-trip tickets
| | 03:56 | to Australia from Qantas. We got
hotel rooms and people all over Australia
| | 04:01 | offered to put the photographers up.
I had no money to pay the photographers at all.
| | 04:04 | I told the photographers that.
Everybody wanted to come. It was like billed
| | 04:07 | as the greatest photo party in the
history. I didn't want photographers
| | 04:10 | wandering around willy-nilly doing
street shooting. Because I knew they all
| | 04:14 | would end up doing the dark
underbelly life of Australia.
| | 04:17 | So we made sure we had assignments
that were geographically and thematically
| | 04:21 | spread out all over the country. So
we tried not to have our photographers
| | 04:24 | overlapping. We self published
the book. We had no publisher.
| | 04:27 | I found a newspaper group that bought
60,000 copies of this book that didn't exist.
| | 04:32 | I mean, talk about luck. Remarkably,
a year and a half after the book came out
| | 04:37 | I was able to send a check for $1000
to every one of the 100 photographers.
| | 04:41 | And you wouldn't think spending
$100,000 would feel good. Writing a check and
| | 04:45 | giving away $100,000 but I promised
the photographers if we ever actually made
| | 04:49 | money on the book, which no one
thought we would, that we would pay them
| | 04:53 | a great day rate for that one day.
| | 04:56 | I thought I'd go back finally to being a
photographer, even though I was kind of
| | 04:58 | disillusioned. I had no intension
of becoming a book publisher or photo
| | 05:02 | entrepreneur or whatever it is that I do.
But about two months after this book came out,
| | 05:06 | the Governor of Hawaii came
to Australia on some kind of trip and on
| | 05:12 | his bed was the copy of A Day in the
Life of Australia. I think he stayed at
| | 05:15 | the Hyatt hotel which is one of our
sponsors. So two weeks later we got a call
| | 05:19 | from Governor's office in Hawaii
saying, we just saw this book you did in
| | 05:23 | Australia and our anniversary of statehood
is coming up. Would you come and do us?
| | 05:26 | It just went on like that. Countries,
politicians, corporations, almost every one
| | 05:31 | of our books become the cover of Time
and Newsweek, which was again kind of
| | 05:36 | bizarre for an idea everyone had
turned down. I never went back to being
| | 05:39 | a photographer again. I got to showcase
a lot of the work of my friends who were
| | 05:43 | photographers. I take pictures on my
own on these books. I sometimes get
| | 05:49 | pictures in the book and I get so high
when I shoot. I mean, I just miss it
| | 05:53 | terribly. I don't miss the editors
and I don't miss not seeing the pictures
| | 05:58 | used that I think should have been used.
But I miss that sort of the feeling of fate
| | 06:02 | and just life happening in front of you.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Publishing portfolio| 00:00 | (Music plays.)
| | 00:08 | One of the things that's been really
gratifying about these projects is that by
| | 00:12 | inviting the world's best photographers
and the best writers and designers and
| | 00:16 | Photoshop experts and lot of different
creative teams, everybody has this pride
| | 00:20 | of authorship, so when the book comes
out or whichever book we are working on,
| | 00:24 | I think every single one of the people
that worked on the project feels like if
| | 00:26 | it wasn't for their piece of the puzzle,
the book wouldn't be what it is or
| | 00:29 | the project wouldn't be.
| | 00:30 | So a lot of the editors from Time and
Newsweek and Fortune have worked on our books
| | 00:34 | and the nice side effect of that
is when they go back to the editors
| | 00:37 | they say we shouldn't just review this book;
we should put it on the cover. So this
| | 00:42 | is like every one of these represents
a multi-million dollar ad campaign that
| | 00:46 | we got basically because people feel
it's a great product and they help make
| | 00:49 | that into a great product.
| | 00:51 | The very first book we did was A Day
in the Life of Australia, which is
| | 00:53 | like your first child. You always have
some sort of a special relation with it
| | 00:56 | and every once in while I pick it up
and one of the things I actually love
| | 01:00 | about this book is we're trying
to figure how to explain to people that
| | 01:02 | you are holding a book which was all shot
on one day. We are still trying to solve
| | 01:06 | the problem of how do have readers
not pick this up and feel like I bought a book,
| | 01:10 | but get them into the
book in some interactive way.
| | 01:13 | So one day at about 3 o'clock in the
morning when we were still trying to finish
| | 01:16 | working on this book and someone had
left the mail on my desk and in the mail
| | 01:22 | was a letter that was returned to me to
one of the photographers I invited to
| | 01:25 | work on the project. So three months
later, it has somehow gone off into the
| | 01:28 | mail system, had the wrong address on it,
and it came back and I remember this
| | 01:33 | being literally 3 o'clock in the
morning and I ripped it open, I sat down, and
| | 01:36 | I imagined myself being a photographer
reading this letter inviting me to come
| | 01:41 | to Australia to work on the book. And
now that the book has actually being shot,
| | 01:43 | it's kind of interesting reading the
letter written before that book was shot
| | 01:46 | saying what we thought was going to
happen and what responsibilities were
| | 01:49 | for the photographers.
| | 01:50 | So I thought what if put the letter
inside the book. Every reader would open up
| | 01:55 | the book and imagine themselves being
one of the photographers getting this
| | 01:59 | incredible invitation. We're going to
fly you to Australia, we are going to put you
| | 02:03 | with the family, you are going to have an
assignment, you are competing against 99
| | 02:06 | other people. There is no guarantee
you got a picture in the book,
| | 02:09 | you might get left out and it's a first time
in history that an entire country is being
| | 02:13 | covered on one day like this.
| | 02:16 | And this became sort of our little
theme for all the books from then on.
| | 02:19 | It was like one of those completely serendipitous,
exhausted, in the middle of the night,
| | 02:23 | what I am still doing here?
I was trying to write captions or
| | 02:25 | something like I was doing here two
nights ago. It's actually sick that
| | 02:28 | 30 years later I am still solving the
same problems or like doing the same thing,
| | 02:33 | but anyway so this is
the first book that we did.
| | 02:37 | We did other books about countries.
We did a book called Passage to Vietnam,
| | 02:41 | which was really, really fascinating
too. We took 70 photographers to Vietnam
| | 02:45 | and let them loose for a week, so
it wasn't just one day. We started
| | 02:48 | experimenting after a while and I was
a wondering was it magic that was
| | 02:51 | 'a day in the life of,' was it the one
day concept, was it the title, or was it
| | 02:56 | this idea of taking incredibly
talented men and women, photographers, writers,
| | 03:00 | journalists, researchers, and putting
them under this incredible time restraint?
| | 03:04 | Because I think creative people are
adrenaline junkies like me and I think we all
| | 03:08 | work better when we were in over our
heads and when we are scared and when we are
| | 03:11 | competing and we haven't slept enough
and it's 3 o'clock in the morning.
| | 03:14 | In almost every single of our books there
has been some technology component.
| | 03:18 | Even A Day in Life of Australia, we had
Apple computers doing organizational work
| | 03:22 | which again never happened before.
A Day in Life of America, which is probably
| | 03:26 | still the bestselling coffee table
book ever published. I think it was up to
| | 03:29 | 1.4 million copies. It was the first
coffee table ever designed completely on a computer.
| | 03:34 | This book was the first coffee table book,
America 24/7. First of all it's 100% digital,
| | 03:39 | which is a first and then in 2003.
So done that not long ago, but
| | 03:45 | in 2003 the world was just going
digital and people said, you will never get
| | 03:49 | the quality. You never be able to do
double-page spreads in a book where the
| | 03:53 | pictures held up, but it did. And then
in addition we introduced this concept
| | 03:58 | of letting people upload their own
photographs and getting a replacement
| | 04:01 | dust-jacket. So it was child on the
cover or your dog or your house or
| | 04:06 | you scanned in your parents wedding from
50 years ago and gave them a wedding gift
| | 04:09 | so here they are in black and
white picture on the cover of that book.
| | 04:13 | A Day in Life of Soviet Union was
very satisfying, because the Russians
| | 04:18 | actually let us take all of our film
out undeveloped, which was apparently a first.
| | 04:23 | They always insisted that
people develop it. And the way we got around that
| | 04:26 | is we actually shot all in
Kodachrome and they had no Kodachrome
| | 04:28 | processing in Soviet Union. So at
first they were insisting that they develop
| | 04:33 | all the film and inspect all of it.
| | 04:35 | We also gave all of the photographers
working on this project a Sony Handycam
| | 04:40 | so that photographers all became our
film crews and in many of these projects
| | 04:46 | we paid the photographers with laptops
or Apple computers or handycams.
| | 04:52 | Then this is a book that was the precursor.
This is Natasha's Story. This book sort
| | 04:56 | of set the stage for the book we are
doing now about Obama, The Obama Time Capsule,
[00:05:2.28]
is seeing that the quality of
a print on demand book starting to rival offset
| | 05:07 | and it's affordable and the quality
is good and it's immediate, it's much faster.
| | 05:13 | At first I sort of saw this is a
prototype where we'll do this book and
| | 05:16 | I'll show it to publisher and then we will
publish a real book, but this sort of became
| | 05:19 | the real book in the course of doing
it and like anything it's still in its infancy.
| | 05:25 | There are still things you would
like to do differently and things you
| | 05:26 | you would like to change about it, but
it's really remarkable the quality of this book
| | 05:31 | and I think the Obama Time
Capsule book is going to be more dramatically
| | 05:35 | that way. I think people would be
absolutely shocked to find out that this
| | 05:39 | is a print on demand book.
| | 05:40 | I mean the theme of all these books is
using cutting-edge technology tools to
| | 05:46 | put a human face on different topics.
So creative storytelling is the top line,
| | 05:51 | but underneath the creative
storytelling is all this technology that
| | 05:54 | either helps you tell the story better
or it brings you partners like Intel or
| | 05:58 | Apple or Hp, that become our partners
in helping tell the world there is such a book
| | 06:05 | and why they should be interested in it.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Planning new projects| 00:00 | (Music plays.)
| | 00:08 | We did two books last year. One was
called the America At Home. One was called
| | 00:12 | the UK At Home. And it's the concept
of home, it's the emotions of home.
| | 00:16 | It's not Architectural Digest.
| | 00:18 | The book we'd love to do next is China
At Home. And we think that using this
| | 00:22 | customization technology that instead of--
America at Home and UK at Home,
| | 00:27 | we allowed people to customize their covers.
But I think going forward, we would love
| | 00:32 | to find a way of maybe mixing,
doing the hybrid of offset and print on demand.
| | 00:37 | So, that one portion of the book would
have all the interactive stuff in it.
| | 00:41 | And the rest of it would be printed
much cheaper and you would actually insert
| | 00:43 | the custom bound chapter into the
offset, pre-printed version to make it affordable.
| | 00:49 | But I think in a country
like China where everyone's got a
| | 00:52 | cellphone camera and photography is
just going crazy there, a project like
| | 00:57 | this might be very well received.
| | 00:59 | I would imagine that people watching
what we do here think that we start out
| | 01:04 | from a position of incredible
confidence and self-reliance and optimism and
| | 01:11 | oddly enough I think I actually
start the opposite side of that spectrum.
| | 01:15 | I actually start out thinking that this
is going to be -- we're going to crash
| | 01:19 | and burn and this is going to be an
enormous failure and how are we going to
| | 01:23 | like survive the fact that
none of this is going to work?
| | 01:26 | I actually started out with that
thought and then once I have accepted that defeat,
| | 01:31 | before I've started, everything
else kind of feels like upside from that
| | 01:36 | point on. It's very bizarre. I mean I
don't think this is all how people would
| | 01:39 | guess I approach these things.
| | 01:42 | I actually like being scared. I like
being in over my head. It makes me feel
| | 01:45 | more alive. I think you find out a
lot about yourself when you're under
| | 01:49 | pressure and when things are going
smoothly, I'm pretty bored. And I feel like
| | 01:54 | I don't actually function very well
unless I'm in a state of terror of some kind.
| | 02:00 | I don't show it. I am really good
at hiding it but I definitely like the
| | 02:04 | adrenaline. You know I have a couple of
projects that I've always thought would
| | 02:07 | be really interesting to do and it
seems like every time we go off and start
| | 02:12 | working on them, another project
sort of jumps right in front of it.
| | 02:15 | It's sort of like when you live in San
Francisco, you never go to Alcatraz.
| | 02:20 | Because you live here. Until your tourist
friends come and somehow all of the
| | 02:24 | projects that I've always wanted to do,
because I really have them in my mind,
| | 02:28 | I figure I will do them, but then
something else comes right in front of it
| | 02:31 | and it seems fresh and different
that I haven't thought about before.
| | 02:33 | Female Speaker: So the way it starts
out is Rick has these huge impossible
| | 02:37 | ideas and what he does is
he circulates with a bunch of wonderfully inspiring
| | 02:44 | people and networks with a huge
diverse amount of people and gets inspired by them
| | 02:49 | and always loves to think about
what's bleeding edge and bring it into
| | 02:55 | photography and photo
journalism and the creation of our books.
| | 02:59 | We are very unconventional. Although,
I'm the one more likely to be the one
| | 03:06 | that has order, making order out of
chaos. What makes everything really
| | 03:11 | exciting is that we're always adding
in other things during the process of
| | 03:19 | making or producing a project. And if
we were not flexible, most of the best
| | 03:27 | ideas would never have happened.
| | 03:30 | So being flexible and allowing for
these impossible things that you should have
| | 03:37 | discounted and said, "no way," help to
actually enhance a project quite often.
| | 03:46 | You have to be a bit of adrenaline
junkie to be able to survive here.
| | 03:53 | And you also have to let-- you just have
to like go with it and solutions always come
| | 04:01 | out somehow. I don't know how but they do.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Switching from film to digital| 00:00 | (Music plays.)
| | 00:09 | Rick Smolan: So I know it probably
seems very antiquated to be dealing with
| | 00:13 | glue and scotch tape and post-its,
but it's still in my mind is the best way
| | 00:18 | to sort of step back and get a quick
overview. I know with Aperture and Lightroom
| | 00:22 | you can create this huge virtual
screen, but I still-- I mean when we
| | 00:27 | have these on the walls, literally
we've got 15 boards with a thousand pictures
| | 00:32 | on it and I don't know how you would
do that on a computer. I don't know
| | 00:35 | how you'd keep track of it. And I used
to do this on a light box, but this is
| | 00:38 | actually I think much more
effective even than a light box.
| | 00:41 | Female Speaker: We completely changed
from one project that was all film.
| | 00:48 | In fact, when we did "24 Hours in
Cyberspace", it was all film. There were no
| | 00:53 | digital cameras at the time. But we had
the film scanned and then emailed to us,
| | 01:00 | which sounds so outdated now,
but that is the way we did it.
| | 01:03 | But when we started the "American 24/7"
series that was completely digital.
| | 01:10 | So we completely just jumped off the
cliff on that project and in fact we hired
| | 01:17 | tons of photographers for that project,
and so many resisted the idea that they
| | 01:23 | had to shoot only digital and they all
tried to sneak in film and we said
| | 01:27 | we won't even look at it. We have to go
all digital. And a lot of photographers
| | 01:32 | were calling us up right before the
shoot week. That was in that particular project,
| | 01:36 | it was a whole shoot week,
and they were complaining and going,
| | 01:41 | "I have a digital camera, but I don't even
want to use it. I don't know how to use it,
| | 01:43 | I don't want to do it."
| | 01:45 | And we had a team of people that were
actually helping them through in terms of
| | 01:50 | kind of talking them down, "you can do it,
you can do it. There is a whole bunch
| | 01:54 | of us out there doing it" and you would
not believe the number of phone calls
| | 01:58 | from photographers we got after the
shoot week, when they said, "thank you
| | 02:03 | so much for forcing me to use my digital
camera, because I was so afraid of it and
| | 02:09 | I can't believe that this project helped make me
get going into that whole digital side of things."
| | 02:16 | A lot of photographers at that point
from the newspaper world were already
| | 02:22 | using digital, but we were tapping
into photojournalists and whatnot that
| | 02:26 | hadn't quite made the switchover yet
and they were really glad that we'd forced
| | 02:31 | them to go digital.
| | 02:33 | Female Speaker: You cannot be a
photographer and not have Photoshop. You cannot
| | 02:38 | be a photographer shooting RAW and not
have any kind of these softwares to open
| | 02:44 | up your images and send them through.
There are a lot of photographers who were
| | 02:49 | shooting the best quality JPEG and
that's good enough for a lot of the papers
| | 02:54 | and magazines.
| | 02:55 | So you've got this kind of, are you
shooting RAW, are you shooting TIFF, are
| | 03:01 | you shooting JPEG, are you working on
the pictures? A lot of them -- a lot of
| | 03:04 | the guys I work with back home in Fast
News are shooting, it's down the wire,
| | 03:10 | into the computer, and it's already at
their desk. There is nothing happening to
| | 03:15 | the picture and it goes
straight into a newspaper.
| | 03:17 | So it's different. But then the high-
end stuff, I mean what we are doing here
| | 03:21 | for example. Some of these
pictures have already won awards and
| | 03:27 | those photographs you know that there is a
craft and the photographer has an eye and
| | 03:32 | they've shot it in a way and they
have then magnified how they want these
| | 03:38 | pictures to look and feel with
some degree of Photoshop work.
| | 03:41 | Rick Smolan: Most photographers that
I know out of pride want to edit their own
| | 03:46 | work to see which images work, which
ones didn't, because you get instant
| | 03:48 | feedback. I think they want to do--
RAW images, which give you this amazing
| | 03:53 | tonal range, tend to be kind of flat.
So you want to sort of -- it gives you
| | 03:57 | the ability to go up or down. So you
want to make the decision and then add
| | 04:01 | your own sort of editorial voice to
how you saw the picture when you took it.
| | 04:05 | Right now as a book publisher though,
I am going back to photographer saying
| | 04:08 | give me your RAW pictures. I don't
like the way you translated that picture.
| | 04:11 | For the book that I am doing right now,
I need to open up the sky, I need to
| | 04:14 | open up the contrast to the shadows, whatever.
| | 04:17 | So in many cases, it's like me saying I
want your negative. And fortunately
| | 04:23 | all the photographers that I have asked
have said, sure. I mean they know that
| | 04:26 | we are kind of obsessive about the
quality. The books that we do are real
| | 04:29 | showcases for photographers. I can
take off my publisher hat and put my
| | 04:32 | photographer hat on very easily. So a
lot of photographers have told us that
| | 04:37 | our books are around for 30 years and
TIME Magazine, your pictures are wrapped
| | 04:42 | in fish the following week or kitty
litter. So I think people feel that our
| | 04:47 | books are something they can be
proud of for an awfully long time.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Team projects| 00:00 | (Music plays.)
| | 00:09 | Rick Smolan: I am always just amazed
at how dedicated everybody is when they
| | 00:12 | work on these projects and
then they become sort of --
| | 00:14 | I literally was dreaming about editing all last night.
I had spent about six hours yesterday reading
| | 00:18 | captions so in my dream I was still
continuing to edit the photographs.
| | 00:23 | I like being part of the team. I mean
I really like having friends and people
| | 00:27 | that I trust and people with the skills
that I do not have in any way, shape or form.
| | 00:31 | I think I also tend to surround
myself with people that I want to tell me
| | 00:37 | what to do. I don't have to listen but
I like people with strong personalities
| | 00:41 | who have various strong opinions, who--
I like that idea of being able to sort of
| | 00:47 | push against other strong personalities.
I don't want people to say, "yes Rick,
| | 00:51 | you know you are the boss, so we are
just going to do what you say."
| | 00:54 | That's really uninteresting and I don't in
any way claim to have the ultimate taste or
| | 00:59 | ability to make the decisions but I
like to hear what lots of people think.
| | 01:04 | And then I try to figure out amongst all
the opinions which one kind of sticks
| | 01:07 | with me if I think about it longer and longer.
| | 01:10 | I think that for doing these kinds of
projects, there is a lot of serendipity
| | 01:17 | involved. I am always amazed how just
the right person seems to come along,
| | 01:21 | just when we need them. And that certain
skills we didn't need six months ago and
| | 01:26 | all of a sudden somebody calls up and
knocks on the door, walks through the
| | 01:29 | door or whatever. Literally I was walking
through a parking lot once and struck up a
| | 01:33 | conversation with a stranger and he ended
up completely saving a project we were
| | 01:37 | in the middle of. It was like of all
of the people in the world that I needed
| | 01:40 | to talk through that day was that guy,
who I end up parking my car next to him.
| | 01:45 | I also think that sometimes
when you are trying to do something
| | 01:48 | impossible that just seems incredibly
audacious and new and fresh, that you
| | 01:52 | attract a certain kind of people that
really love the idea of helping build the
| | 01:58 | airplane and making something that's
never been done before. I think there is a
| | 02:01 | certain kind of person that's attracted to
that idea of jumping on board and making
| | 02:07 | something work that has so
much risk attached to it.
| | 02:10 | Female Speaker: We have a wonderful
network of many freelancers around the
| | 02:13 | world that we tap into and everybody
has a really unique specialty that they
| | 02:19 | bring to our projects that we get to
tap into. And we always try to think of it
| | 02:24 | as a long timeline and we have great
talent that taps in at different points
| | 02:30 | throughout the project cycle.
| | 02:32 | What's so fun when we bring these
people back is that they are usually like,
| | 02:37 | wow, that was a crazy project. But now
I totally get it and now I know how --
| | 02:42 | okay, I get how this one works. And
so they bring a bunch of great creative ways
| | 02:48 | to help make the next project
that they work on together with us even
| | 02:52 | better from their perspective.
| | 02:54 | Rick Smolan: One of things I think
people love about working on our projects is
| | 02:56 | that unlike almost any assignment a
photographer normally gets, we say please
| | 03:02 | go out, here is your assignment.
But once you get out there, if you find
| | 03:04 | something more interesting, you can
scrap the assignment and come back with
| | 03:07 | something completely different,
as long as it fits within the guidelines of
| | 03:11 | what's going to work in the book.
| | 03:12 | And that is-- photographers don't
hear that very often from people that are
| | 03:17 | hiring them. Now the danger of your
photographer is that if you go off and you
| | 03:21 | are enterprising and you come up with
a totally different assignment, we may
| | 03:24 | have assigned that same topic to
someone else, because the photographers don't
| | 03:27 | know what the other photographers are shooting.
| | 03:29 | So you are taking a risk that by going
off topic, you are then decreasing your
| | 03:34 | chances of getting into the book.
We don't promise anyone ever that
| | 03:37 | they are going to get it to one of the book.
So, people assume, well, if we flew
| | 03:40 | somebody to China or Vietnam and
spent all that money and sent them off on
| | 03:44 | assignment, obviously you are going to
put their work in the book. But that's
| | 03:46 | not at all true. The best pictures
are what end of the book. Our loyalty
| | 03:52 | after the pictures come back is to
the reader, not to the photographers.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Frozen moments| 00:00 | (Music plays.)
| | 00:09 | For me, one of the most fun things of
doing a book is taking two pictures shot
| | 00:13 | by two different photographers, so when
you put them together, they are a hundred
| | 00:17 | times more powerful. It's just the
position of the pictures that sort of brings
| | 00:20 | them to life. And then depending on
what came before and what came after it,
| | 00:24 | you're sort of building this whole
sort of animal out of all these separate
| | 00:28 | parts that you've found in a box somewhere.
| | 00:30 | I always say that doing these books
feels a little bit like doing a jigsaw
| | 00:33 | puzzle, but you've lost the box that
all the pieces came in. So we don't know
| | 00:37 | what this is supposed to look like.
| | 00:39 | We put it together, we go home, we all
come back the next day and we print a
| | 00:43 | PDF up every night and everybody looks
at it and so we're constantly less and
| | 00:47 | less but at the beginning we were
swapping huge parts of the book.
| | 00:50 | We're throwing half of the book
out, starting over again.
| | 00:52 | So when we lay the book out like this,
part of it is we're trying to decide how
| | 00:57 | many pages we want in the book,
are there certain pictures that are too repetitive,
| | 01:01 | have we already shown Obama
with a big crowd behind him? There is a
| | 01:04 | million pictures like this that are
just fantastic, but you don't want that
| | 01:07 | many in the book because you
kind of touched on that topic.
| | 01:10 | When we're doing our books, I think
I first react to the design and then
| | 01:14 | I slowly react to the content. The thing
that I have to be really careful about
| | 01:18 | is all of us have very strong
associations with different things. If you were
| | 01:24 | bitten by a dog as a kid, you might
regard all dogs as scary or evil, whereas
| | 01:29 | no one else would see that picture as
anything other than a cute little puppy.
| | 01:32 | So even though sometimes I fall in
love with a picture, I really like hearing
| | 01:37 | everyone's reactions to it. I sort of
feel like our books, it's a little bit
| | 01:42 | like a Communist election. Like you
want everyone to vote, but ultimately
| | 01:45 | you still make the decision
of who you want to win.
| | 01:47 | But if I hear everybody else say 'that
picture just totally sucks' and I keep
| | 01:51 | thinking I love this picture.
After a while, I realize you know what,
| | 01:54 | there is something about the picture that
reminds me of something, but it obviously
| | 01:57 | doesn't work for anybody else.
| | 01:59 | The other thing I have to be careful
about is there are some pictures that are
| | 02:01 | like bumper stickers. That the first
time you think when you see it, that's so cool.
| | 02:04 | Then like when the fourth
time you see it, it just wears out.
| | 02:09 | In a book like this, you want pictures
that have lasting value that resonate that-
| | 02:13 | I often talk to my kids sometimes about-
my daughter asked the other day
| | 02:20 | like, what makes something art?
She would be wondering what makes
| | 02:23 | something art. We were looking at
actually a picture of the Mona Lisa and
| | 02:27 | she's saying, well why is that considered art?
| | 02:30 | If I drew a picture of something, would
that be art? I said, well everything is art,
| | 02:32 | but I said, the art that I like
are things like the Mona Lisa or Bob Dylan songs
| | 02:37 | or photographs where it's the
combination of the object itself and then
| | 02:43 | your response to it.
| | 02:45 | So it's you plus the Mona Lisa
wondering what the smile means. It's you
| | 02:49 | listening to Bob Dylan's music and
then making up the word pictures in your head
| | 02:52 | which maybe totally different
than the word pictures in your head.
| | 02:56 | It's sort of like my father, Elliot
Erwitt. If you look at his pictures
| | 02:59 | on one level, it's a bird looking
onto the ocean and there happens to be a
| | 03:04 | little water facet sitting next to it
and then you suddenly realize that
| | 03:07 | the shape of the bird's beak
and the shape of the water facet are
| | 03:10 | exactly the same.
| | 03:11 | You think oh, that's a coincidence
and then you turn the page and you start
| | 03:14 | realizing, oh my God! Everywhere this
guy goes, he keeps seeing these echoing
| | 03:18 | patterns and shapes and some of them
are so sophisticated and so fast. I mean
| | 03:23 | some of these pictures, they were just
like caught like that, and then you look
| | 03:26 | and the shadow on the kid's face,
the little bands from the shadow from a tree
| | 03:30 | is exactly the same shape as the
railroad tracks going off in the background and
| | 03:34 | then you realize, oh my God in the
background there, there is a third echo of it.
| | 03:38 | So that stuff gives me goosebumps
because it has to - it can't be done on a
| | 03:41 | conscious level. I love pictures like
that we can put it into our books where
| | 03:45 | there is a story, but you don't want to
give too much of it away in the caption
| | 03:49 | where people get to make up their -
you get to react to it emotionally and then
| | 03:53 | you read the caption to see if
you've sort of guessed it right or not.
| | 03:55 | Those are my favorite kind of photographs.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Ethics of photojournalism| 00:00 | (Music plays.)
| | 00:08 | Female Speaker: A picture may no
longer be worth a thousand words. These days
| | 00:12 | the picture that the camera takes may
well not be the picture that we end up
| | 00:16 | seeing in newspapers and magazines.
Technology makes it difficult, maybe even
| | 00:21 | impossible to tell what's real and what's not.
| | 00:24 | Male Speaker: I think that every
time there is a new technology like this,
| | 00:27 | there are a lot of ethical questions
which have to be answered. I think the
| | 00:30 | first thing that happens is that the
artist, the creative people, wow, Russell and
| | 00:34 | his company have invented Photoshop.
Let's play with it. Let's see what's going
| | 00:37 | to happen and examples of that were the
cover of A Day in the Life of America
| | 00:41 | where we move somebody on a horse.
This was a beautiful picture but the horse
| | 00:44 | was actually further down that same
hill. So we slid the horse up the hill.
| | 00:49 | I don't know if that's ethically correct
or not. I do know as a book publisher,
| | 00:53 | when I'm trying to capture someone's
attention in a bookstore, I'm trying to make
| | 00:56 | the image very graphic, very quickly.
| | 00:58 | Rick Smolan: It's easy to say the
technology makes you more likely to doubt
| | 01:03 | the reality of the photographs. But way
before Photoshop, the New York Times had
| | 01:08 | an entire retouching department that
would retouch lots and lots of the photographs.
| | 01:13 | I remember once years ago, the New
York Times ran a story critical of a book
| | 01:18 | that I had done called A Day in the
Life of America because the cover of the
| | 01:21 | book was a picture by Frans Lanting of
a man on a horse going up the hill and
| | 01:26 | there was a moon up here and
he unfortunately shot it as a horizontal picture
| | 01:30 | and we wanted to use it as a cover.
We basically had a Sightech machine and
| | 01:35 | for thousand of dollars, and we slid the
guy up the hill and compressed it. So now
| | 01:39 | the guy is going up the hill and the tree was here
and we covered all the dead space in between.
| | 01:43 | So New York Times does this article
criticizing this book of photojournalism
| | 01:47 | and how dare they have manipulated the
cover of the book. That's outrageous.
| | 01:49 | We didn't care. It was great publicity for
the book. But about six months later I was
| | 01:53 | doing research on something and I went
to the New York Times archives and there
| | 01:57 | was a picture I had seen, of Ayatollah
Khomeini in Iran, in a window with
| | 02:02 | his hands down, reaching down to the crowd
and there were like thousands of hands
| | 02:07 | reaching up towards him.
Just a fantastic picture.
| | 02:09 | And so I wanted the picture for a
prototype of a little thing I was trying to do
| | 02:14 | and they actually stored the
pictures in tubes at the New York Times.
| | 02:18 | I went down to their archives. The woman
gives me the tube. I open it up and pulled
| | 02:21 | the picture out and I look at this
picture that I had seen in the New York Times.
| | 02:25 | And next to Khomeini were two
guys that had been retouched out.
| | 02:29 | Must have been his translator or an aide.
| | 02:31 | So they had erased two people
from the picture to make this wonderful
| | 02:35 | powerful shot. But the New York Times.
And when I asked, they said,
| | 02:39 | "Oh we've had retouching
departments since the 20s."
| | 02:42 | So here is the paper of record
regularly manipulating the photographs because
| | 02:48 | it looked better. I mean today they
would never do such a thing. I mean they
| | 02:51 | actually have tighter rules today with
Photoshop than they did back in the days
| | 02:54 | before Photoshop. There is a
wonderful quote I think that's attributed to
| | 02:58 | Ansel Adams. I think it is Ansel Adams
who said, the negative is like a score
| | 03:02 | of music and the print is the performance.
| | 03:04 | So I think this is wonderful. It's
exactly right. If you look at the Moonrise
| | 03:08 | over Hernandez, picture of the moon
rising and the little horses in the fog.
| | 03:13 | He printed that picture totally
differently throughout his life. Sometimes it was
| | 03:17 | very dark and sort of murky and you
can just see the horse and other times
| | 03:19 | it was very bright.
| | 03:21 | I think that digital photography gives
you even more of ability to do that.
| | 03:27 | You probably see the colors blue
differently than I do. It used to be that
| | 03:31 | Fujichrome look totally different than
Ektachrome and looked different than
| | 03:34 | Kodachrome. Well, what was the right color?
I mean which one of those was real?
| | 03:37 | None of them were real. They were
all representations of what was there.
| | 03:40 | So I don't have any problem with
getting scratches off of or removing dust or
| | 03:47 | changing the contrast or if it's all
purple in here because it's florescent.
| | 03:51 | I don't have a problem bringing it back
to daylight because my eyes are bringing
| | 03:53 | it back. I don't see it was all
purple in it. But I do have a problem with
| | 03:57 | people erasing parts of a picture,
adding new things to the picture because
| | 04:00 | then it's a photo composite. As long
as you say it's a photo composite,
| | 04:03 | it's okay. It's when you misrepresent the
picture that I think that you will have a problem.
| | 04:08 | So I really think it's about ethics;
it's not about technology. I think
| | 04:11 | journalists, I think people that call
themselves photo journalists are kind of
| | 04:17 | not sworn, because they don't swear at
anything, but there is sort of a code of honor
| | 04:21 | which is that you don't manipulate
the photograph. Now if I had a
| | 04:25 | telephoto lens, I can make you appear
to be close to the car behind you.
| | 04:30 | And that's okay. Nobody minds that. Or
I could crouch and get rid of the tree
| | 04:35 | that's coming out of your head right
now. That's okay. But I can't do it
| | 04:38 | afterwards in the dark room. I can't
make the tree disappear. I can't get rid
| | 04:42 | of the telephone lines behind you ethically.
| | 04:45 | Some people will say that wasn't part
of the picture. It was just distracting
| | 04:49 | in the background. So I mean this
conversation is going endlessly with
| | 04:51 | photographers. I don't know what the
right answer is, but I know that in the
| | 04:54 | world of journalism, it's
just something that you don't do.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Tools & techniques| 00:00 | (Music plays.)
| | 00:09 | Rick Smolan: Caroline has got two
screens here so,she can see the overview of
| | 00:12 | our database. We've actually
organized all the pictures into --
| | 00:15 | they're color-coded by which chapter of the
book they're in. The online tool that we're
| | 00:21 | using right now allows us to--
anywhere in the world we can tap into this tool
| | 00:25 | and we could be writing captions or
doing research or... Do you want to explain
| | 00:30 | a little bit about how it works?
| | 00:32 | Caroline: Yeah. So we collected all
the photos from the different labels
| | 00:37 | and agencies and we can now plug them here
as a low-res and they get created a
| | 00:42 | unique identity code, which is then
our reference for finding the images and
| | 00:46 | that's how we find them from all our team.
| | 00:49 | Once they go into here, they're then split
into the various chapters of the book.
| | 00:55 | At that point, we can then start to
drop in any captions. All the metadata has
| | 01:01 | been put in there and then no matter
where anybody is, they can all go in and
| | 01:05 | do their own thing. This has been
customized from our colleague in France,
| | 01:09 | Topher, to our specific requirement.
| | 01:12 | So, we're finessing it and anything that
we need, that may not be in any other
| | 01:17 | kind of software, we're able to say
this would be kind of cool if we could do this.
| | 01:21 | It's slowly developing into this
sleek piece of software that is really,
| | 01:27 | really cool. Not at the
beginning but now like, it's great.
| | 01:32 | Rick Smolan: I think when you look
at the finished product, whether it's a
| | 01:35 | book or a TV show or the website or
exhibits or publicity or whatever, it all
| | 01:39 | looks very buttoned-down and it's sort
of like having the meal and the waiters
| | 01:44 | bring out the food and it all looks very
elegant and you don't actually go and
| | 01:46 | look in the kitchen at the mess and
the spaghetti on the floor and the meat
| | 01:51 | sauce on the ceiling.
| | 01:53 | I think that this whole idea of
customized books is definitely coming.
| | 01:56 | I think we're early. I think it's the
pioneers with the arrows in their backs.
| | 02:00 | I think that's kind of true for a lot of
earlier projects. But in terms of our
| | 02:04 | reputation, Against All Odds
Productions is aptly named, because a lot of
| | 02:08 | our projects shouldn't actually work.
| | 02:11 | We're usually ahead of the curve, both
from the technology point of view and
| | 02:15 | also from the money part of the curve.
So, right now we have people that are
| | 02:19 | providing us with technology and
programming and resources, but no one is
| | 02:23 | paying anything to speak of for this.
Now, the real test is, are people going
| | 02:27 | to buy the book or not?
| | 02:27 | Female Speaker: Because we're sort
of this kind of like a production
| | 02:33 | company, like a movie production
company that grows and then disbands,
| | 02:38 | all of our tools tend to disband as well
and we start over every time with a new set
| | 02:43 | of tools, which can be incredibly
frustrating, but at the same time can be
| | 02:48 | extremely liberating, because we start
fresh every time and you iterate on the
| | 02:53 | ideas and know what worked before.
But you're using newer tools, so you're not
| | 02:58 | stuck with legacy software or
legacy equipment and whatnot.
| | 03:05 | Our process for our workflow is always
evolving and we're always trying to use
| | 03:10 | the latest tools. In fact, ahead of
the curve tools. When we have something
| | 03:16 | that we're about to do and people go,
wow, did you know you can do this with
| | 03:20 | photos now? And we're like, oh, cool,
let's try it out. Because we don't have
| | 03:25 | this huge infrastructure that we have
to always feed. Instead, we can start
| | 03:30 | over fresh every time.
| | 03:32 | What's cool is we get to share that
with all of the photographers and editors
| | 03:36 | and everybody that works on our
projects, because we do a sneak peek into
| | 03:42 | what's the latest and greatest way to
do things. Then they take that away with them
| | 03:47 | and take it to their everyday life.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Print-on-demand revolution| 00:00 | (Music plays.)
| | 00:09 | Rick Smolan: There has never been a
bestselling print-on-demand coffee table
| | 00:13 | book in publishing history and there
is a simple reason for that. It's too
| | 00:17 | expensive. Right now, a print-on-demand
book that we print one at a time, costs
| | 00:21 | about four times as much as a book
you print in China or Korea and then ship over here.
| | 00:26 | But it also, print-on-demand gives you
the sense of immediacy. So, what we are
| | 00:31 | really excited about is it's the
first time people could personalize a book
| | 00:34 | like this and we are trying to
see if we can make this the first
| | 00:38 | print-on-demand bestseller in history.
It's a nice challenge. I don't think of
| | 00:42 | myself as a book publisher. I like to
think myself as a photo entrepreneur.
| | 00:45 | I mean, my orientation is Photography
and Story Telling, but if I want to
| | 00:49 | compete with these big, huge,
behemoths of the publishing world, who have
| | 00:54 | billions of dollars and editors and
distribution, I have to figure out how to have
| | 00:59 | our products appear different in some way.
| | 01:02 | Female Speaker: We're really excited
on our current project, to be working on
| | 01:06 | this new concept for us of print-on-
demand. It's not something that we've ever
| | 01:11 | done before and we've taken--
we've always gone the traditional of shipping
| | 01:18 | files to a printer and letting
them print it and then ship all
| | 01:24 | the books and distribute them throughout
the network of book stores and whatnot.
| | 01:28 | We are excited to be kind of dabbling
in to this world because maybe this is
| | 01:34 | the wave of the future, for the way
that books will all be printed. And right now,
| | 01:40 | it's rather expensive to do it
this way, but we think that with this
| | 01:45 | current project, The Obama Time Capsule,
we are showing this great wonderful content
| | 01:50 | with print-on-demand technology
and if everybody can see the value of it,
| | 01:56 | the prices will naturally fall down.
And will we go the other way? I don't know.
| | 02:03 | We'll see with our next project,
if by the time that we begin our next
| | 02:07 | project, well, we might find that this
is the way to do-- print-on-demand is the
| | 02:11 | way to do all our projects.
| | 02:13 | Rick Smolan: More and more, I find
that companies like ours, like Against All Odds,
| | 02:16 | we come up with an idea, we raise
the money, we hire the editor,
| | 02:20 | the photographers, the writers, the
designers, we do the publicity ourselves, and
| | 02:25 | all the publisher does is basically
they are a bank. They basically give us
| | 02:28 | a loan, kind of a non-repayable loan
hopefully, and they have a distribution
| | 02:33 | network to get your book in the stores,
because I don't know how to do that and
| | 02:36 | I really don't want to know how to do it.
I am not interested in selling my book
| | 02:40 | to book stores.
| | 02:40 | So if I can produce the book and have
Amazon sell it, I can do two things.
| | 02:44 | I can either double the price and then
keep that $25, which would be the smart
| | 02:49 | thing to do. It's what my mother would
tell me to do, or you can be crazy like me
| | 02:53 | and I would actually take out the
publisher's percentage and still keep
| | 02:57 | my royalty at the absurdly low price,
but then charge the public a lot less.
| | 03:01 | So that's what we are trying to do
here. We have asked everybody to kind of
| | 03:04 | forgo their profits, and just
this is a great publishing experiment at
| | 03:08 | a depressing time in publishing.
I love doing the book and I just thought,
| | 03:12 | this will open the doors for future books.
| | 03:14 | So, I mean, this is all coming. It's
just the question of whether it's 5 years
| | 03:18 | out or 10 years out. And I hope people
look back and think this was the first
| | 03:22 | book that really showed that it
looks as good and it's as affordable,
| | 03:26 | and then I think people will look
at that a little differently if this thing
| | 03:30 | hits the way I hope it will.
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| Generations of photography| 00:00 | (Music plays.)
| | 00:09 | Rick Smolan: My dad was a photographer
in World War II. He photographed the
| | 00:13 | surrender of the Japanese. All my
brother-in-laws are photographers,
| | 00:15 | my sister-in-law is a photographer.
I mean, I am surrounded, everybody in
| | 00:18 | my family is either a designer, a
filmmaker or a photographer, and my parents
| | 00:22 | weren't-- I mean, my dad was photographer in
World War II but he was a businessman when
| | 00:26 | I was growing up, so I have been
doing this since I was 14 years old.
| | 00:31 | It's exciting to be able to now
feature the work of the people that were my
| | 00:36 | heroes when I was growing up, and to
help try to maybe discover some of the new
| | 00:41 | young photographers. I feel like the
aging rock star that doesn't get on
| | 00:45 | stage and perform anymore, but now
I get to produce the young bands.
| | 00:48 | That's what it feels like.
| | 00:50 | This sort of seems to run in our family
and what's really interesting watching
| | 00:54 | Phoebe and Jessie is they have been
picking up my cameras over the last couple
| | 00:58 | of years and it's so interesting to
sort of see the world through their eyes.
| | 01:01 | Both of them are really good at it.
They like the interaction with other people.
| | 01:05 | You really love taking
pictures don't you? And she has been
| | 01:08 | photographing since she was very, very young.
| | 01:11 | One of the things we do sometimes is we
sit and look at grandpa's books. And we
| | 01:16 | talk about how he had such a wonderful
sense of humor, but it's almost like
| | 01:20 | a New Yorker, kind of dry sense of humor.
It's not silly cats hanging from poles.
| | 01:25 | It's things where you suddenly see
juxtapositions in pictures. And I have
| | 01:29 | noticed looking at Phoebe's pictures
and Jessie's pictures, of some of those
| | 01:32 | same elements starting to show up where
they are seeing the relationship between
| | 01:37 | people or objects in the picture.
| | 01:39 | So this morning we sat down with Phoebe
and Jessie and asked them to each pick
| | 01:44 | their favorite picture and Phoebe,
I thought maybe you can talk a little bit
| | 01:48 | about why, of all these pictures in
this book, why is this picture of this
| | 01:54 | little boy on the beach, why is this
the one picture you want to talk about today?
| | 01:57 | Phoebe: So there are all these people
doing yoga and stuff on the beach and there
| | 02:03 | is this naked little boy that is
standing there, and a lot of people when
| | 02:05 | they look at this picture, think that
he is just looking at the crowd doing yoga,
| | 02:14 | but a lot of people don't see this when
they look at this picture, but actually
| | 02:16 | over here at the end of the crowd,
there is a little girl doing yoga too
| | 02:20 | and I think that's what he is looking at.
| | 02:22 | Rick Smolan: Yeah, I never noticed this
little girl till this morning when she
| | 02:25 | pointed it out. I have looked at the
picture probably a hundred times and
| | 02:30 | never noticed that before. That's
pretty cool. When you take pictures, is there
| | 02:33 | something that you look for? I mean,
what's your favorite thing to photograph?
| | 02:36 | Phoebe: Animals.
| | 02:38 | Rick Smolan: Yeah, I thought so.
| | 02:39 | Phoebe: One of the things that it
really stands out that is one of my favorites
| | 02:45 | was when I was in Hawaii and
it's sort of a modern picture, but so I
| | 02:50 | was laying back in a chair right by the
pool with a shade over it and I saw a
| | 02:57 | bird flying in the sky and I was a
little too lazy to get up, so I just took
| | 03:07 | the camera and I just shot upward
and from the light, the top of it turned black
| | 03:13 | and then the sky shadow against
it and then there is bird flying,
| | 03:18 | so it's just, I think, it's really cool.
| | 03:21 | Rick Smolan: Like a silhouette?
| | 03:22 | Phoebe: Yeah.
| | 03:23 | Rick Smolan: Jessie also loves
photography. He is always borrowing my camera.
| | 03:28 | And the other day I found a picture he
took of me while I was shaving in the
| | 03:30 | morning. It was shot like basically
from the ground up, so it looked like this
| | 03:34 | huge towel with little tiny head on top
of it, remember? You did that the other day?
| | 03:38 | It was pretty funny.
| | 03:40 | Jessie: I took this picture because
it's like a joke where there are like
| | 03:44 | two people sitting down and then in this
next picture, that wind, it looks
| | 03:52 | like the wind blew and then
they like flew right off of it.
| | 03:55 | Phoebe: I think it's really unique
to have a family that does so much
| | 04:02 | photography and we always
make books and it's just cool.
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| Interview with Lynda| 00:00 | (Music playing.)
| | 00:09 | Lynda Weinman: Hello, I am Lynda
Weinman with lynda.com and I have the pleasure
| | 00:12 | today to be here with Rick Smolan
from Against All Odds Productions.
| | 00:16 | Rick, it's fantastic to be with you today.
| | 00:18 | Rick Smolan: Nice to be here Lynda.
| | 00:19 | Lynda Weinman: Thank you. The first
time that I ever heard about you was when
| | 00:22 | you created a book called From Alice
to Ocean which had a CD-ROM in it and
| | 00:27 | it was one of the very first examples of
an interactive multimedia CD-ROM and
| | 00:32 | it was just fantastic and opened so many
doors and so many people's imaginations.
| | 00:39 | I mean it was really one of the very
first interactive CD-ROMs. Is that correct?
| | 00:43 | Rick Smolan: I have always thought
that the news media or the people hire us
| | 00:47 | often throw away some of the most
valuable things that come along with us being
| | 00:51 | photographers which is - it's not an
ego trip for the photographers but when
| | 00:54 | you see a photograph of a fellow
stopping the tank in Tiananmen Square or
| | 00:58 | the Andy Adams picture of the street shooting,
the caption underneath it is factual.
| | 01:02 | It says here is a lone protester
stopping a tank in Tiananmen Square.
| | 01:05 | But wouldn't you love to have a
conversation with the human being who took
| | 01:08 | the photograph, and how did you get
your film out and when the picture was
| | 01:11 | published did the Chinese, have you
ever been let back into China again, and
| | 01:14 | what happened to the guy a minute after you
took the picture and all that exists but
| | 01:18 | somehow the news media kind of
distills it out to just kind of very
| | 01:21 | dispassionate information.
| | 01:23 | So when I first saw CD-ROMs and
started learning about multimedia and
| | 01:27 | the Internet, I thought, Wow! Wouldn't
it be cool if you could add, not that
| | 01:32 | readers have to have that
perspective, but you can give people multiple
| | 01:35 | ways of viewing the picture.
| | 01:36 | It could be just the caption or it
could be tell me about the person who took
| | 01:40 | the picture, or tell me the technique
how did you take the picture, what was the lens.
| | 01:43 | The reader or the viewer
could choose all those different
| | 01:47 | perspectives and I found very few
people that seem to be thinking about CD-ROMs or
| | 01:51 | DVDs or the Internet that way still.
| | 01:53 | Lynda Weinman: In a way, it was a
precursor to what happens today on DVDs,
| | 01:56 | the extras that now are part of that.
So at that point you were at the cutting
| | 02:02 | edge of technology. It seems like you
really like hanging out at the cutting
| | 02:05 | edge of technology. Can you talk a
little bit about your-- how you were
| | 02:10 | introduced to technology and how it is
that you got to be on the cutting edge,
| | 02:15 | because not very many
people live there like you do?
| | 02:17 | Rick Smolan: I think a lot of people
felt that technology is like an amplifier.
| | 02:21 | It lets you do things that --I don't feel--
I sometimes don't feel very capable.
| | 02:25 | I am a pretty good photographer,
but I am not a good programmer.
| | 02:29 | I mean I rely on other people. What I love
about technology, it seems to amplify
| | 02:33 | what little abilities I have to do
things and so in a way feeling a little bit weak
| | 02:38 | actually makes me more attracted
to technology because I can find a way of
| | 02:43 | somehow having a broadcast network
in my office because I can talk to a
| | 02:47 | million people on the Internet or I
think also, this is sort of jumping around
| | 02:50 | a little bit, but I do these big
photography projects over a year and there's a
| | 02:55 | million people who do photo
books and a lot of them are great.
| | 02:58 | So I have had to from the very
beginning figure out how to get resources to do
| | 03:02 | these crazy big projects. I find that
by finding companies who invented new
| | 03:07 | technologies, very often they are looking
for an avenue to put a human face on what they do.
| | 03:12 | Lynda Weinman: Sure, a compelling story
that will justify their existence.
| | 03:15 | Rick Smolan: Exactly. It's funny. We
did a book one time called One Digital Day.
| | 03:19 | It was Intel's 30th anniversary
and they came to us and I said, we are a
| | 03:25 | group of journalists. We don't do
annual reports. This is from Andy Grove who
| | 03:28 | is the CEO and he kept saying, well
but we would love you do this book about us.
| | 03:33 | I said, well, what would be
interesting would be to do an entire book about
| | 03:37 | the microprocessor and never show a
microprocessor and just show the effect of it,
| | 03:42 | and that's what the book was. But
what was so interesting to me is Intel
| | 03:47 | said, well, we will give you
tons of ideas for assignments.
| | 03:50 | I have to tell you that we got almost
no assignments from their ideas.
| | 03:54 | They actually had very little idea of how to
put that human face on their technology
| | 03:58 | and they were totally thrilled with
the book because it was fascinating and
| | 04:03 | interesting and invokes your emotions
and brought tears in your eyes and made
| | 04:06 | you laugh. But they were so into the
technology and the marketing of that chip,
| | 04:11 | it was really hard for them to step
back 30,000 feet and actually realize that
| | 04:15 | the entire human race now has been
powered by these chips in a remarkable way.
| | 04:19 | So I found over the years a lot of
these technology companies have actually
| | 04:23 | come to us saying, can we fund our
next project? Because you seem to have
| | 04:28 | this ability to grab these to take
these very talented journalists, not just
| | 04:33 | photographers but writers, Nigel
Holmes is incredible info graphic
| | 04:37 | designer, and bring their technology alive.
| | 04:41 | Lynda Weinman: Now you are one of the
most consistent networkers I have ever met
| | 04:44 | in terms of meeting Andy Grove and
putting HP together on this project and
| | 04:50 | so has that always again been one of
your gifts or how did you cultivate that
| | 04:54 | aspect of yourself because--
| | 04:56 | Rick Smolan: No, I was painfully shy.
| | 04:56 | Lynda Weinman: I mean so many people
have ideas but so few people execute on them,
| | 05:01 | especially to the degree that
you do where you come up with innovative project
| | 05:04 | after innovative project with amazing sponsor
after amazing sponsor. So that's interesting
| | 05:09 | that you were shy. Tell us a little bit
about how you think you have developed.
| | 05:12 | Rick Smolan: I guess there were two
things I can remember from being a kid that
| | 05:15 | were both perceived as negatives.
One was being very shy. I couldn't talk to
| | 05:19 | strangers at all. I couldn't talk to
anybody at all. I sat in the basement as
| | 05:22 | an amateur radio-- I used to do Morse
code and sit in the basement by myself.
| | 05:26 | Lynda Weinman: You don't
have to talk with Morse code.
| | 05:27 | Rick Smolan: Yeah, exactly. That's what
I mean. You just sit there and sort of tap away.
| | 05:30 | The camera was my way of kind
of getting over the shyness. I mean
| | 05:35 | it let me go up to strangers, girls in
particular when I was 16, and talk to
| | 05:39 | people that I had no reason to be
talking to and the camera was just this
| | 05:43 | wonderful excuse to sort of poke my
nose into other people's lives and my wife
| | 05:49 | accuses me of using it as way of
being there but not being there.
| | 05:53 | It's like family events. I am taking
pictures instead of interacting with my kids.
| | 05:56 | So I am forced to put the camera
down occasionally. But, the hyper focus thing
| | 06:01 | I think actually can be a
great attribute if you use it properly.
| | 06:04 | Lynda Weinman: Absolutely.
| | 06:06 | Rick Smolan: It's obsessive and
it's annoying to people around you,
| | 06:08 | but in terms of getting things done --
| | 06:10 | Lynda Weinman: Well, I think almost all
highly successful people are obsessive
| | 06:14 | to be honest and have that kind of
laser focus and also work incredibly hard.
| | 06:19 | I know you are one of the hardest working
people I have ever met. You are constantly working.
| | 06:23 | Rick Smolan: I love it though.
For me it's not work.
| | 06:24 | Lynda Weinman: For you it's not work.
| | 06:24 | Rick Smolan: I think one of the things
that's great about being a photographer
| | 06:27 | and being in the creative fields in
general is that you are what you do and
| | 06:31 | you love what you do. I can't wait to work
on projects. I mean I wish I could take a
| | 06:36 | pill and not sleep for a month at a
time. I love sleeping but I just --
| | 06:39 | Lynda Weinman: It's too much to do.
| | 06:40 | Rick Smolan: Yeah, I mean your brain.
Sometimes when I am really tired, that's
| | 06:44 | when my brain kicks in. It's almost
like you forget where you are, it's that--
| | 06:48 | When I used to run when I was a little
younger, I loved that sort of runner's high--
| | 06:53 | Lynda Weinman: The endorphins.
| | 06:55 | Rick Smolan: The endorphins, when you
are working on something and your brain
| | 06:58 | goes into sort of overload. A friend
of mine, Marissa Mayer at Google, is just
| | 07:04 | an amazing woman. When you talk to her,
she is like those all FedEx commercials
| | 07:08 | where the guy talks so fast and you
realize that her mind is running even
| | 07:11 | faster. She almost stumbles over her
words because you can tell her brain is
| | 07:14 | running four times faster than
her mouth and she talks really fast.
| | 07:17 | One of the reasons that I love being
in Northern California is being around
| | 07:23 | people like Andy Grove and Marissa and Larry
and Serge and Steve Jobs. I mean I don't know all
| | 07:28 | these people that well. I have met most
of them. But, for them, the thing that
| | 07:34 | defines success isn't how much money
you have got or the car you are driving.
| | 07:38 | It's who has got the cool idea. So it
seems to me that's much more of a
| | 07:43 | West coast thing than an East coast thing.
| | 07:45 | It's much less about appearance.
It fascinates me to see people who are so
| | 07:53 | successful. But again, the way they
measure that success, their ongoing success,
| | 07:58 | is the cool new idea and concept.
When you talk to them, they are just driven
| | 08:03 | to come up with a new cool idea. And it
has nothing to do with making money from it.
| | 08:07 | What I love about the people at Google
is there are so many things these guys
| | 08:10 | have done where the money was a complete
afterthought, if at all. I mean Google Images
| | 08:15 | has never been monetized. It's been
out there, Marissa created this, and
| | 08:17 | it's been out for five or six years,
no advertising at all on it.
| | 08:21 | I said why? I said, you know I use this
all the time. She said, well, we tested it
| | 08:25 | and 3% of the people that we tested
said that they would be irritated by it.
| | 08:30 | We just decided it wasn't worth the
extra $60 million a year that Google might
| | 08:33 | make compared to irritating those
people. But there are so many things like
| | 08:38 | that that they have done.
| | 08:39 | Lynda Weinman: So what advice do you
have for people who are just getting into
| | 08:43 | any of these fields, photography or
making books or any kind of creative
| | 08:50 | endeavor where you are telling
stories and you want to publish, you want to
| | 08:53 | become a publisher?
| | 08:54 | Rick Smolan: What I would tell young
photographers or artists or anyone else in
| | 08:57 | the creative world is, I'm amazed at how
many of the people that I meet who are pretty
| | 09:02 | talented but are waiting for someone
else to give them their break.
| | 09:06 | It's like if Time would just hire me or if
National Geographic and I always found the way
| | 09:10 | that I got hired was I would find
things I was interested in and I'd shoot them
| | 09:14 | and then I'd go and take that work and
show it to editors and then I'd go back
| | 09:18 | and shoot some more and show it to
editors again and like the fifth time
| | 09:20 | I showed up, people would say, wow, if
you are working this hard for yourself,
| | 09:24 | imagine how hard you will work when
we are actually paying you to do it.
| | 09:26 | Lynda Weinman: I think you are giving
some golden advice right now, showing
| | 09:31 | initiative and not waiting for someone
to hand you the golden ticket but kind of having--
| | 09:38 | Rick Smolan: You also do it because you have to
do it. I mean it's not like you have a choice.
| | 09:40 | Lynda Weinman: Yeah, it
becomes your own expression.
| | 09:42 | Rick Smolan: Right, you are just driven.
| | 09:43 | Lynda Weinman: Exactly.
| | 09:44 | Rick Smolan: Then, it seems like when
I meet people that are driven that way,
| | 09:47 | they always end up becoming successful
because people just want to be around
| | 09:52 | other people that are driven because
it's kind of-- people get pulled into
| | 09:56 | that vortex, when somebody is just so
interested and excited and happy about
| | 10:00 | what they are doing and want
to share it with other people.
| | 10:02 | Lynda Weinman: Very true. Well, thank
you for letting us enter your vortex.
| | 10:05 | Rick Smolan: Oh sure.
| | 10:06 | Lynda Weinman: You gave me a great outro
there. It's been fantastic. Thank you, Rick.
| | 10:09 | Rick Smolan: Thanks for having me.
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