A Day in the Life of Australia

(twangy upbeat music) - Being in Asia for so many years and being with so many photographers, one of the things that surprised me so much was that the same men and women tended to show up at all the big events. I would sit around at the bars with these men and women, and a lot of it was in Bangkok, there always seemed to be a place we'd all go to in between. It was inexpensive, it was fun, it was warm. And these other photographers, many of whom were my heroes, would sit around and do nothing but moan and complain. What was happening is that we would all get, all the photographers get very emotionally involved with things they were shooting. And you really wanted your pictures to change the world. You really hoped that you would just blow the lid off some situation or shock people or that your pictures would actually have some affect other than serve the purpose of selling ads in a magazine. And as I was sitting around in a bar with Philip Jones Griffiths and JP La Fonte and a kind of related bunch of people and I said, wouldn't it be cool if we could all get together, all of us, and descend on a country for 24 hours? Like, just cover the, blanket the country and all go, on your mark, set, go, it's midnight. We all start shooting. We do a book in one day. And so, all my friends in Bangkok that night said great you go organize it and we'll all come take pictures, thinking that would be the last of it. So I went back to Australia, I went to publishers, I went to 35 publishers around the world thinking they'd fall over at the brilliance of this idea, you know. The best photographers in the world let loose for 24 hours, a day in the life of Australia. And I got laughed out of their offices. Every single publisher, 35 publishers I met with, said who on earth would pay $40 for a book of pictures taken on a day that nothing happens in some god forsaken country on the other side of the world like Australia? Who would care about that? So I went back to my friend the Prime Minister and I said, you know, Mr. Prime Minister, I want to do this book about your country. I went to all these publishers, no one's interested. Could you like pay to bring all my friends to Australia for this project? And he said, nice try. And he said, but I will help you. And I thought, oh yeah, okay it'll be one of these shining me on sort of polite things. He said, okay, first I'm going to give you a letter saying I know who you are, I respect you, admire your work and, I said, yeah, so what do I do with a letter? He said, okay, just stick with me here, okay? He said, I have a good idea for you. And then he outlined what I've been doing for the last 25 years in the next like 10 seconds. He said, okay, I'm going to set up meetings for you with the CEO's of companies all over Australia. I said, and how's that going to help me? And he said, okay, you're going to tell them that you're doing, you're producing the Olympics of photography. I said, okay, I'm sorry but I'm really stupid, I still, I don't get it. Okay, you're doing an Olympic's of photography. You're bringing the best photographers in the world to Australia and it's this huge competition to see who can get the best pictures in your book. I said, well it's not a competition it's a collaboration. He says, Rick, I've been around you guys. You're all trying to outdo each other. It's a definitely a competition. He said, I said, so what am I asking these companies for? He said, okay, you're going to Kodak, you're asking them for film. You're going to Quantas, you're asking them for airline tickets. You're going to Hertz asking them for cars. You're going to the Hyatt and asking them for rooms. This guy Steve Jobs has started this computer company, you're going to ask him for computers. And I said, and why would they give me this stuff? And he's like, I remember him being completely exasperated with me, he said, okay, you're going to put their logo on the front page of your book. You're going to give them a special edition of the book with the letter that the chairman can write. You're going to talk about them when you go on the Today show. I said, I'm going on the Today show? I'm like, totally shy, still at this point. He said, this is a really exciting idea and all these companies are going to, he said, it may be hard to do it, but I think with my letter and my introductions and you show them the cover of National Geographic that you just did and you show them your covers of Time. So, I went out there and I met with almost 600 companies, took two years. I was sleeping on a sleeping bag in my friends apartment in Melbourne. I stopped shooting photographs. And I just, it was a great lesson in rejection. And six companies out of 400 said okay. But we got a hundred first round trip, a hundred first class round trip tickets to Australia from Quantas. We got hotel rooms and people all over Australia offered to put the photographers up. I had no money to pay the photographers at all. I told the photographers that. Everybody wanted to come. It was like billed as the greatest, you know, photo party in history. I didn't want photographers just wandering around willy nilly doing street shooting because I knew they'd all end up doing the dark underbelly life of Australia. So, we made sure we had assignments that were geographically and thematically spread out all over the country. So we tried not to have our photographer overlapping. We self published the book. We had no publisher. I found a newspaper group that bought 60,000 copies of this book that didn't exist. And then talk about luck. Remarkably, a year and a half after the book came out I was able to send a check for $1,000 to every one of the hundred photographers. And you wouldn't think spending $100,000 would feel good, writing a check and giving away $100,000, but I promised the photographers, if we every actually made money on the book which no one thought we would, that we would pay them, you know, a great day rate for that one day. I thought I'd go back finally to being a photographer even though I was kind of disillusioned. I had no intention of becoming a book publisher or a photo entrepreneur or whatever it is that I do but about two months after this book came out the Governor of Hawaii came to Australia on some kind of, you know, trip and on his bed was a copy of A Day in the Life of Australia. I think he stayed at the Hyatt hotel which was one of our sponsors. So, two weeks later we get a call from the Governor's office in Hawaii saying we just saw this book you did in Australia and our anniversary of statehood's coming up, would you come and do us? It just went on like that. Countries, politicians, corporations, almost every one of our books became the cover of Time or Newsweek which was, you know, again, kind of bizarre for some, an idea everyone had turned down. I never went back to being a photographer again. I got to showcase a lot of the work of my friends who are photographers. I take pictures on the, on my own on these books. I sometimes get pictures in the book. And I get, I get so high when I shoot. I mean, I just, I miss it terribly. I don't miss the editors. And I don't miss not seeing the pictures used that I think should have been used. But, it miss that, sort of, the feeling of fate and just, you know, life just happening in front of you.