The MOOD Podcast
In The MOOD Podcast, Matt Jacob, renowned cultural portrait photographer, dives deep into the world of photography and the visual arts, with guests from all around the creative industry, across all parts of the globe, sharing inspiring stories and experiences that will leave you wanting more. With years of experience and a passion for storytelling, Matt has become a master of capturing lesser-told human stories through his photography, and teams up with other special artists from around the world to showcase insights, experiences and opinions within the diverse and sometimes controversial photography world.
You can watch these podcasts on his Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mattyj_ay.
You can also follow Matt's work on his Instagram @mattyj_ay and his website: https://mattjacobphotography.com.
The MOOD Podcast
Against all Odds: Rick Smolan, EO76
What's the secret to finding humanity in the most unexpected places?
Rick Smolan is a world-renowned photographer and CEO of Against All Odds Productions. Creator of the groundbreaking Day in the Life series, his illustrious career in photography showcases the transformative power of storytelling through imagery.
Rick has spent decades pushing boundaries with his work, which has spanned continents, best-seller lists, and media outlets, focusing on raising awareness about critical global issues, from the human face of big data to social justice movements.
Highlights of our conversation:
- Discussing the Day in the Life series and its impact.
- Navigating the ethical dilemmas in photojournalism.
- Exploring the intersection of technology and storytelling.
- The evolving role of photography and the challenges photographers face today.
- Why personal storytelling and authenticity remain key to standing out as a creative.
- The secrets to pitching projects to CEOs and securing support from major corporations.
- Navigating the rise of AI, misinformation, and the enduring value of authentic photography.
Find Rick's work on his channels:
Website: www.againstallodds.com
Instagram: @ricksmolan
Threads: @ricksmolan
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Welcome to the Mood Podcast. I'm covering the art of conversation one frame at a time. I'm your host, matt Jacob, and I want to thank you for joining me in today's conversation. Today, I'm thrilled to have Rick Smolin as my guest.
Matt Jacob:Rick is a legendary photographer, storyteller, ceo of Against All Odds Productions and creator of the groundbreaking Day in the Life series. His work spans decades across various continents, media outlets and best-selling lists, all the while raising awareness for critical global issues through innovative projects like the Human Face of Big Data and the Good Fight. From collaborating with National Geographic to using photography as a tool to tell the world's most important stories, rick's career is an inspiring testament to the power of visuals in shaping public consciousness. In our conversation, we explore the origins of his success and common traits that got him to the forefront of the photojournalism world, into the biggest photography agencies and magazines of the 90s and 2000s, and to a prominent speaker on a plethora of cultural and topical stories and causes across a wide range of media outlets. We also discuss the Day in the Life series and Rick's catalytic vision behind capturing collective stories in one single day, as well as his innovative work with big data and its impact on storytelling and his experiences photographing stories that pushed social and political boundaries. We also discuss the evolution of photojournalism, the ethical dilemmas that come with it, and Rick's perspective on the role of photography in shaping global conversations today.
Matt Jacob:It's a fascinating journey into the mind of one of the industry's most influential creatives, and I really hope you enjoy it as much as I did. So now I bring you Rick Smolin. Rick Smolin, welcome to the Moo Podcast. Thank you for joining me.
Rick Smolan:Nice to be here, Matt, thanks.
Matt Jacob:And you're joining us from New York City.
Rick Smolan:Yes, freezing New York. It's yesterday within the high 50s and rainy, and today it is really really cold and windy. So you know we've had a very mild winter so far.
Matt Jacob:A great time of year to be in New York leading up to Christmas.
Rick Smolan:That's nice to see all the lights and people excited. Regas are two weeks away now, so there's that sort of anticipation there.
Matt Jacob:Well, look, we have so much to talk about. Your career spans decades. You've done so much in the world of photography but so much kind of outside and connected sectors and connected industries as well. So it's very difficult to kind of distill all of that down into an hour and a half conversation. But let's give it a go. And I wanted to really dig into your brain a little bit and start by asking you what your most meaningful piece of work would be. If you had to pinpoint one piece of work or one project.
Rick Smolan:It's a little bit like which of your children or your dogs do you love the most? I mean, there have certainly been some moments that I'm always as a photographer. I'm going to jump around here, but I was once photographed in the prime minister of Australia and I was with a whole group of photographers. I was the only American in the group. It was in Japan, he was on his way to China and the secret service people came back to the press card and said where's the American kid? And I had hair down to my shoulders. I was 25 years old. And the secret service people said the prime minister wants to talk to the American kid. And all the other journalists said oh, you're in trouble now, mate. I had no idea what I'd done wrong and, like the prime minister wants to talk to me, and they took me up to the front of this. It was the bullet train going from Tokyo to Kyoto. They put me in this little room and they closed the door. I'm thinking he's going to yell at me. I mean I hadn't spoken to him. I was one of the million. You know all these guys and women taking pictures and he said first of all, he said do you prefer the 24 millimeter Nikkor or the 35 millimeter. He was like a slotted photographer. But then he and we just chatted for a while.
Rick Smolan:Once I got over my nervousness and he asked me the strangest question. He said do you ever have two days in a row that are the same? And I said what do you mean? He goes do you know what's going to happen to you throughout the course of a week? I said well, you know I'm photographing you. He said I know. But he said in your general life, do you do the same thing every day? Do you know what's going to happen in two days? And I said well, no, I mean when I'm shooting for Time Magazine or National Geographic or whoever, I walk into my hotel and I have a vague idea of what I'm going to shoot, but the day unfolds and I turn left instead of right. And he said when I wake up on Monday morning, I get handed a piece of paper and it prescribes every moment of my life for the entire week. And he said I am so jealous the idea that life unfolds in front of you. And I remember I'm this 25-year-old kid in the prime minister of Australia telling me he's jealous of my life. It was one of those totally surreal moments and I realized I didn't realize how lucky I was.
Rick Smolan:You know, I was part of a group of about 100 men and women from all different countries and someone called you on the phone and say can you be in Bangkok in 24 hours? What's the assignment? You meet the writer at the Hilton Hotel. You're shooting a cover story on Taiwan. I mean it was like a total fantasy life and then I would basically go and I've never seen my pictures. I would ship all my film back to New York or Tokyo or London or Paris and go on to the next job because we were shooting film back then.
Rick Smolan:So it was this weird life where I mean, also, I'm competing against all these much older and much more experienced men and women and yet the moment we weren't shooting, when we were shooting, it was every man and woman for themselves, you know, but the moment we weren't shooting, it was like a family. I mean, all these people said they took care of me. They then kid you know the buses, they'd be half an hour early in the morning and don't buy film at that store because they let it bake in the sun. And here's the home number on the American ambassador when you go to Taiwan. I mean it was amazing how there was this camaraderie and competition and I would pinch myself every day that I was part of this group.
Rick Smolan:But I also I never had any other life. I mean I went from college to being a freelance photographer. So I've never had a job my whole life. I mean I've never had a day-to-day job where I do the same thing every day. But I always think back to that conversation with the prime minister of how strange it was, how prophetic it was, and now, looking back, how lucky and fortunate I was to have kind of stumbled backwards into this world of photography.
Rick Smolan:I never studied photography, didn't go to college for it. My dad, in fact my dad was so adamant that I not be a photographer. He wouldn't let me attend any university that had a photography program. He said you know, I'm not sending you to college to do baby pictures and wedding portraits. I mean, you're going to be a doctor or a lawyer, something you can support yourself. So anyway, that's a very long-winded answer. So you're asking me whether there were. There were two stories that I did as a photographer and then my life changed after these two stories. But one of them was I was sent by. I'm trying to back up here to make so this all makes sense. So I'm going to back up even further and I'll get I'll. I'll answer your question, but it's great, it's great Like.
Rick Smolan:One of my college professors allowed me to create my own photography major. So within two weeks I would do it. My father told me he would not allow me to do. Um, there was no photography department. So I said, can I create my own photography major? And the guy that had the art department said no one's ever asked that before. But okay, um, and and that before, but okay. And then at the end of college, after four years, my dad was still very skeptical and not very happy about all this.
Rick Smolan:The same art professor knew someone at Time Magazine and said take your yearbook to Time and show them your work. I think you're a really good photographer and I thought you know my yearbook. Taking my yearbook to Time Magazine, it just sounded so stupid but I did and I met a gentleman there and it turned out that he had a history of looking for one young, hungry photographer every year and throwing them out in the middle of the lake and seeing if you could sink or swim. And in fact, the first assignment he gave me I found out afterwards it didn't matter if I screwed it up or not, he was just testing me the first assignment I had for Time Magazine, the first important one was there was a woman in Sarah Caldwell who was a very famous opera conductor and they told me that she doesn't like being photographed. She was quite overweight, didn't like pictures of herself and I had all week to prepare to go and photograph this woman and I should have turned to one of my other older friends and asked them to teach me how to light. I thought about it Somehow, I kept ignoring it and I thought well, I'll get it. It was in November, which in the United States is. You know it's the fall and I thought I'm going to go to Boston, I'll take her outside, I'll shoot her an open shade, it'll look fine.
Rick Smolan:I get up to her house. It's pissing with and the house is dimly lit with like 15 watt light bulbs. This is back again in the days of film and I just remember starting to sink in this terrible depression because I tried unscrewing the lampshades. I had tungsten film. You had to have special film to shoot when you were using a certain colored light and it was so obvious I didn't know what I was doing and she was getting more and more irritated.
Rick Smolan:Her mother was in a wheelchair and I had to ask you if we could move her mother out of the, out of the frame. And just when I was about to like literally almost shoot myself because I thought this is my opportunity of a lifetime and I did nothing to prepare for this there's a knock on the door and it's a CBS film crew that's come to to do a whole story about her and they light the entire house and I'm sitting there trying to hide in the background, hoping that she and they don't throw me out, and I would wait until they weren't rolling that I'd shoot some pictures. And I still didn't thought I did a good job, but at least the lighting went decent. And so I remember one of these guys put gaffer's tape on the wall and tore off part of the wallpaper. They almost knocked her mother out of the wheelchair twice. These guys were so rude and so pushy.
Rick Smolan:And when they finally left, she looked over and she said are you still here? I mean, I was like hiding in the corner. I was so terrified that somebody was going to kick me out. And I said yeah, and when I was I was 25 at the time, but I probably looked like I was 14 years old. I always looked very young and she said do you want a milk and cookies? She actually offered me a glass of milk and cookies and I just heard her on the phone trying to order a limousine to take her to New Hampshire the next day, about a three hour drive.
Rick Smolan:And I remember I was hearing her on the phone saying well, now, how was I supposed to know I was supposed to order three days? Well, no, I need it. I need it tomorrow. What do you mean? You don't have any.
Rick Smolan:And I remember she hung up the phone and so I said ma'am. I said I heard you're trying to get a car to go to New Hampshire tomorrow. Could I rent a car and be your driver? And she said, excuse me. And I said look, this is my first assignment for Time Magazine and it's a really big deal and I don't think I've done a good job of photographing you and I know that you're kind of irritated at me for even being here. And she said you're going to run across and drive me to New Hampshire. She said I always wanted my own driver. So she said, okay, I drove her to New Hampshire.
Rick Smolan:She let me spend a week with her. I was only being paid for one day, by the way. I was actually being paid for an afternoon. I spent five days with her and then at the end of the week she said I'm going to Mexico to start working on a new opera. Do you want to come with me? So Time Magazine was ecstatic. I mean, this is a woman they thought was going to get eaten alive because apparently every photographer that had been sent to photograph her had flamed out and she just like threw them out. It was so obvious I didn't know up I probably wouldn't be cautioned to. Right now, it's a little twist of fate that are, um, kind of amazing um, what less?
Matt Jacob:what lessons can we draw from that? I guess honesty, uh, tenacity just listening.
Rick Smolan:I mean, it was, it was, you know, it was desperately a hail mary. You know, um, I I went back to time magazine, uh, and they were very happy with me and and uh, apparently I didn't realize that the guy that I spoke to originally was the head of time, the director of photography, but there's all these women, it's all women basically assigned, uh hired most photographers. So he said you did a great job. I want you to walk down this aisle and show your work to all the women that may give you work. And so I showed my work to all these women and I walked out of one of the offices and there was a young guy sitting there who was waiting to talk to one of the other photo editors. His name is David Burnett and he introduced himself very friendly and he said hi, you know, and I had a box of prints with me or something. And he said can I see your work? He was about three years older than me but obviously very accomplished, and I showed him my work and he said you know, this is really nice stuff. He said are you with an agency? I said what does that mean? He said well, there's Magnum and there's Sigma and there's only a lot of photographers are banded together into agencies so that they can go out and shoot when the agency back in New York or London or Paris or wherever, will get them more work. And the way it works is the agency takes 50% of your money but they get you all the assignments. So it seemed like a decent trade. So he said a group of other are forming an agency called contact and we're looking for one young, hungry photographer. And he said to be honest with you, there's assignments that come into the agency that none of us want to do, because we're all pretty experienced and you're good, but you're kind of starting out. So it's like give it to Mikey. And I was like I said I'll do anything, I don't care, just you know, whatever you want to do is fine. So it's fine. So I was with Annie Leibovitz, eddie Adams who shot the picture in Saigon of the famous street shooting Douglas Kirkland and Marilyn Monroe wrapped in a sheet, my friend David Burnett and these wonderful photographers, and they also took me under their wing. And so about six months after we all started, the agency began and we're doing lots of work.
Rick Smolan:One day David Burnett called me and he said have you ever been to Tokyo? And I said no, I've never been to Asia. And he said there's an assignment none of us want to do. And I said what is it? And he said it's the first nonstop flight from New York to Tokyo and you're going to fly 18 hours. You got to get off the plane. You're going to photograph two executives shaking hands, get back on the plane and fly back to New York. Do you want to go? And I said can I get off the plane? He goes yeah, if you, it's your own dime. If you want to explore Tokyo for a few days on your own, sure, I mean, it's an open, it's an open ticket. So I said, sure, I'll go.
Rick Smolan:So I was sleeping on my sister's couch in New York. I didn't have a place to live at that point. I said to my sister I left on Monday so I'll be back on Friday. I came back 11 months later. The moment I got to Japan it was like this is so cool, I love this.
Rick Smolan:And when Time Magazine found out I was in Japan, they called and said the prime minister the one I mentioned a few minutes ago he was coming to Japan on the way to China. So in the course of meeting the prime minister because I was there early in Japan the prime minister said we have a program where we bring four or five journalists at the government's expense. We invite you for an all expense paid skeptics for Australia, because we're kind of in the bottom of the world and at that time Australia didn't have the film industry yet. It wasn't the sort of the golden place people want to go to now. So I flew to Australia. Time Magazine again was thrilled that I'd gotten this invitation from the prime minister.
Rick Smolan:The city of New Patry. First I got adopted by Sarah Caldwell, the opera conductor. Now I got sort of adopted. The prime minister actually invited me to his house. I did his Christmas card and again I had hair down here. I was this weird hippie kid. All the other Australian crafts were quite, you know, suit and tie and I was like love beads and all the rest. So I think people were amused by me.
Rick Smolan:So Time Magazine, I called them, I checked in. I said look, I'm in Australia now and they said well, since you're there, we want to shoot. We want you to shoot a cover story in Aborigines. I said great, and and they said so, fly to alice springs. There's the writers already written the story. There's a young woman that he worked with there and she'll take you into the aboriginal camps. Get your permission to take pictures. So I flew to alice springs, checked in the hotel I was, but I have no sense of direction matt, which you'll be amused at as the story continues.
Rick Smolan:But I walked out of my hotel and made it. I was supposed to make a right to meet this woman and I made a left. I just got lost and this incredibly beautiful girl was washing the windows of my hotel. Um, and you know, blonde hair, blue eyes and a tight sarong, and I was 26 years old at that point and had three cameras around my neck. And so I took some pictures of her and she started screaming at me to put my goddamn cameras down. Who the hell do you think you are I did.
Rick Smolan:One of the things I learned early on again from my other photographer friends was never, never, leave somebody angry. If somebody is angry at you for photographing, even if you don't speak the language, you walk over and say I'm so sorry. And so I said to her I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you. I said the light was so beautiful. You were backlit, you know, as if that means anything to anybody. But I said, and? And she started saying what? Are you a journalist or something? And I said, yeah, working for time magazine. I was like full of myself. And she said you, goddamn journalists, you, you, I didn't trust you. You're all goddamn parasites. You people come in here every week. You take advantage of these people, you take your pictures, you get your hundreds of dollars a day and you leave them in misery. And I said, um, I'm actually here to try to expose what your government has done to these people. And she wouldn't have any. She was not hearing any of it. So I apologized and I left, met the woman down the street who I was supposed to have met in the first place. She took me to the camp, so we got permission. I took photographs.
Rick Smolan:At the end of the day, this woman said what are you doing for dinner tonight? I said I'm going to go back to my hotel and again, we're shooting film back then, right? And she said, well, a group of us that work with Aborigines are having a dinner party tonight. Would you like to come? Maybe you could get some other ideas with things you want to shoot. So I said, yeah, that'd be great.
Rick Smolan:So I drive, I take, she gives me directions and I drive to this abandoned looking building. The roof is caving in, it looked like no one lived there, except I heard music and I could smell food cooking. And I knock on the door and of course, who answers the door? But the woman who I'd photographed earlier today, that was watching the women's in my hotel, who was not happy to see me, like what the hell are you doing here? And I said your friend invited me to a dinner. And she said well, put your cameras down, you can't take pictures of my friends. I said, like, leave your guns at the door. So I walked in and the back of her house she had these camels tied up.
Rick Smolan:So I went to Jane, the woman working for me, and I said what's for the camel? And she said, oh, robin's got this crazy idea that she's going to walk 2000 miles from Alice Springs through the Gibson desert out to the Indian ocean ocean. And I said why? And she said we don't know. We're afraid she's gonna die out there. We've all told you we want to go with her. She won't let anybody come. She's insisting she does this by herself. And I said wow, it's pretty crazy. Um, and then I didn't think anything more about it.
Rick Smolan:I spent the rest of the week in town with jane, shooting all over town, and the day I was leaving, um, jane said oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you, remember the girl with the camels? And I said yeah, a little hard to forget. She said well, she wants to ask you a favor, but because she wasn't very kind to you, she's a little awkward about asking. I said I was trying to think National Geographic a year ago, asking if they would give her money to support her trip, and they never responded. And she thought do you know someone there? Could she use your name maybe to open the door? I said you know, I met somebody in a workshop last year, but I don't know that that would help any. I said fine, I wouldn't tell her she could use my name.
Rick Smolan:And I flew back to America after being away for 11 months and about a week later my phone rings at the Center of National Geographic, bob Gilka, and he said I don't know if you remember me. We met at this workshop. He said, of course, I totally forgot about giving my name to this woman in Australia. And he said well, we got a letter from this woman in Australia about this Campbell trip that she wants to take and it sounds fascinating and we're thinking of supporting her trip. But is she in that case? Is she for real? And I said well, since you're intense, I've seen her maps, I've seen her camel. I know she's spent two years getting ready for this. I was trying to say she's sort of a little angry young woman, but whatever.
Rick Smolan:And he said well, since the two of you are such good friends, would you like to be the photographer that we assigned? And he said you're kind of an Outback guy. I mean, you do climbing and hiking, and I wasn't even a Boy Scout, matt. I literally couldn't even change the tire of my car. So I said oh yes, I'm your man, I'm Mr Outback. And so I fly back to Australia.
Rick Smolan:And she says what are you doing here? I said I'm here to photograph your trip. Because she said no, I'm what. She said what are you talking about? I said you asked the geographic for money and they assigned me to take pictures of your trip because I knew she was leaving in about three weeks. And she said no, I don't even want my friends coming, let alone you. I said you know you're welcome. She said, like no offense, but I, yeah, I, she'd, said she's. I said, well, then give them back the money, cause that's the deal. She said, well, I'm going to take the pictures. I said no, you're the subject of the story. They want you to write it, but they want me to photograph it. And she said we can come out once. I said, well, no, they want me to meet you five times during the trip.
Rick Smolan:And and uh, so it didn't start out very well. Uh, she was not happy to have me on the trip. Um, before I started the trip, um, you know, the geographic didn't pay that well, but they gave you an almost unlimited expenses. So I bought a Toyota land cruiser. I had a second gas tank put in it, you know, so I could switch over. Um, I went to one of these outfitting stores in Melbourne and I again was kind of full of myself and I said you know what's your national geographic and what gear do I need for the Outback? And they sold me every piece of crap known to mankind. I mean, the car was like groaning under all this stuff.
Rick Smolan:So when I showed up in Alice Springs, her family was there, her friends, to see her off, and on top of my car was a raft. And she said what's the raft for? I said you know the flash floods, they told me about it. She said there aren't any flash floods in the Outback. It rains like every 20 years in the Outback. I was like the laughingstock of all of her friends, this total room from New York who was completely clueless. So anyway, it was quite.
Rick Smolan:Her trip was extraordinary. It was fascinating. She was amazing. We became really was fascinating. She was amazing. We became really close. Eventually. She was always pushing me and probing me and challenging me.
Rick Smolan:I remember early on in the trip one day, I mean I'd come out and spend four or five days with her and then leave and every time I'd stay longer. And one of the first times I went out there I remember she said you Americans treat friendship like Valium, it's like the insult of the day. It's okay. What is that supposed to mean? She said well, every time I see Americans together, you're all saying don't worry, it'll be fine, It'll all work out. And I said that's a bad thing. She said yeah, because in Australia if you care about somebody and they're doing something stupid, they're marrying the wrong person, they're doing drugs, they're screwing their lives up. You hit them over the head with a two by four, like you risk your friendship to actually be a friend. And she said you're all cowards, like you're just, you're nice to each other instead of actually doing what a friend should do. And I remember thinking, okay, well, I can't speak on behalf of all Americans, but it was definitely interesting. I mean, so many of the ways that she thought about things made me think in a way I'd never been sort of challenged before.
Rick Smolan:I think on the third trip out there with her, I you know when I would leave her. I'd go off and shoot stories for other magazines. I was a freelancer, right. So I just finished shooting a cover story on Taiwan for Time Magazine and I someone said how did you find her? Like she's out there by herself. So how did you find her? As long as I could find an Aboriginal mission, they could always lead me to her. So I found an Aboriginal mission. I said have you seen the camel lady, which is what they all called her? And within within a day I could always find her. And so I showed up and I was. I. I literally had been. You know, I'd been on a plane and I'd been on a second plane and then I got a car and I found this mission, that I found her and I was like buzzing and full of adrenaline and I was telling her about the Taiwan cover story.
Rick Smolan:I was worried about my film being x-rayed if my cameras were okay, if the story was still going to run, because sometimes you shoot a story and then back in New York or Paris, london, the news had taken over and so your story wasn't the story anymore. And then I was saying you know, when I leave you, I'm going to drive my car about 300 miles ahead and leave it, leave it at a cattle station. And I remember in the middle of this I was blathering a lot about something and she said when are you going to get here? And I said, well, next time I'm going to be here. And she said, robin, I'm sitting on this side of the campfire and you're sitting there, I'm actually here. And she says, no, you're not. You tell me you want to spend time with me.
Rick Smolan:And then the whole time you're here, you're lost in your head about your film in Taiwan and where you're leaving your car, and like, could you actually ever be present and be in the moment and not be lost in your fucking head the whole time. I just remember being again like somebody slapping you. It's like you see so many people now sitting in restaurants with their significant other and they're all on their phones and would everybody accept the person that they're with and I? This is a long time ago, but she had every conversation with her. It was sort of like that kind of like well, I never thought about that. You're right, I'm not present, I should like stop. You know, still my mind Right.
Rick Smolan:So, um, the whole trip was extraordinary, um and uh, I, every time I left her, I remember looking in the rear view mirror wondering if I would, if she would die, die, I'd never see her again. There were herds of wild camels there's, there's snakes, there's scorpions, there's crazy people out there. I mean it's, it's really, it's not even the wild west, it's like it's it's no man's land out there. And uh, I remember she told me once, um, she had like crude maps that had been like hand-drawn, of like, of like you know where to go and how to navigate. And she said on her map it would show an intersection like this is all dirt roads and, and they would say, when you get to this uh, intersection, the road, there'll be a road going to the right, a road going to the left. Take the one to the left to walk two weeks, you can get to a well where you can replenish your water. And she'd get there and there'd be five roads going off because people with their cars had just made their own paths. So she'd have to choose which of the ones to the left was going to take her to the well and which ones. If the water wasn't there, she'd be dead.
Rick Smolan:So I mean, it was, the whole thing was amazing. There's no GPS back there, there's no satellites, there's no cell phones. I mean it was extraordinary that she didn't die out there, um, and what happened in the end? Well, she was attacked by wild camels, um, um, at the end of the trip. Um, um, it's a long story, but, um, the media found out about her and so there's this craze of, uh, paparazzi out there trying to find her at one point, and she finally got to the end of the trip. It was a miracle that she made it. And I kept telling her you should write a book about this someday and she said you know, why do you have to turn everything into a product? Why can't you just experience things and not be marketing it and packaging it? And then, a year after the trip, she actually wrote a book called Tracks, which her publisher, jonathan Cade, thought would sell a few thousand copies and it's now like 1.4 million, 18 languages. It's required reading every Australian high school.
Rick Smolan:And then they tried to make it into a movie, and originally Diane Keaton tried behind the rights, then there was let's see, and then it was Julia Roberts, then it was Helen Hunt, then it was Nicole Kidman. Every four or five years they get a call from Hollywood saying oh, we're doing the movie, you won't need to be a consultant, which meant they want me to sign my life rights away. And then about 10 years ago, I got a call from a gentleman named Emil Sherman, who is the head of Seesaw Films in Sydney, and I said look, I've had this conversation now over and over and over again with you people and he said no, we've got the money, we've cast Robin. Uh, we've got a guy named Adam driver, uh, who was on a show called girls at the time way before he was at star Wars. And uh, um, and they said, no, we want you to come and be on the set during part of the shoot. Uh, and they were really wonderful to work with and I said they'd been a wonderful movie called tracks, the same as her book. Um so, dan, so that was a very long winded answer to your question, but that was definitely one of the most interesting assignments I ever had as a photographer.
Rick Smolan:As a person, I mean, she changed my life. She changed the way I thought about things. At the end of the trip I'm going to answer your question. But at the end of the trip I remember she said to me are you going back to being a prostitute now? It's like, really, you're still doing this to me. And she said, no, I mean this in a good way. I said, okay, what part of asking me if I'm going to be a prostitute again is a good thing? And she said she said, rick, until my trip, I feel like someone would call you and say care about this for a week, care about that for a week. Basically, you know you were hired, done. And she said I feel, with my trip, your loyalties were not to the geographic, not to your career, but to me, which is true and she said my question is are you going to keep waiting for someone else to tell you what's important to photograph and to try to use your skills as a photographer to affect the situation instead of just documenting it, which led to this other story about Natasha, a little girl that had been fathered by an American GI and abandoned in Korea.
Rick Smolan:I found out there were 40,000 children all over Southeast Asia who had been fathered by American GIs, in Vietnam and Korea. Any place where we have GIs, they leave kids behind and the local government say these are the children of American GIs and the American government says these are the children of prostitutes or of, you know, of local women, and so no one wanted these kids. They were lost in this horrible limbo. So I decided I was going to again. This Robbins challenge to me is a little bit like go cut off the head of the dragon to win the hand of the princess. I was trying to prove myself to her and also I mean she did inspire me a lot with her trip and myself to her, and also I mean she did inspire me a lot with her trip. And so in the middle of I chose six kids in different countries and I made a lot of money for Robin's trip, and so I invested that in doing the story about admiration children.
Rick Smolan:And in the middle of doing the story one of the kids I was photographing this girl, eunsook Lee, in Korea. Her grandmother died and left her to Nina Will. So at that point I was 27 years old and suddenly I had this 11 year old girl who didn't speak a word of English, who looked very, very Western, and so that was a whole other incredible year adventure of trying to find a family for her. The grandmother wanted me to adopt her before she died. She asked me if I would adopt her and I said look, I'm 27 years old, I don't live anywhere, I'm not married, I stayed by my sister's couch. I'm the wrong person to be the father to your granddaughter, but my best friends ended up adopting her, and it was a whole incredible story. I flew my friends to Korea to meet her when they agreed to adopt her, and the second night we were there.
Rick Smolan:Our hotel caught on fire and we're on the 11th floor of this Korean hotel and with the fire coming up floor by floor and people jumping out of the windows beneath us, and I remember thinking first of all. I was absolutely terrified, of course, but I was also feeling so guilty that I've been playing God with all these people's lives, with her life and my best friend's life. His son had flown over also with him and I remember thinking you know, this is what you get when you fly too close to this sun. You know, I felt like here I was so full of myself and I'm not really this, but it felt like I remember thinking God, if you let us live, I swear I'll do something else with my life. And she's lived happily ever after.
Rick Smolan:We survived the fire. My friend actually saved us in the middle of this fire with our room filling with smoke and we're all choking. My friend who builds homes in Atlanta, georgia. He yelled at me do you have gaffers tape? I'm thinking we're tying a hotel fire. What is it? Gaffers tape? He said rick, we're gonna die from the smoke. All we can do right now stop the smoke.
Rick Smolan:And so he got he. He soaked towels we could breathe through. We took gaffers tape and taped up the door where the smoke was coming through. We put room service menus over the vents and then we put the kids in the windowsill to try to get air, and I remember there was the building, the scaffolding of a new building being built right across the street from our hotel, and they're all these photographers, paparazzi, waiting for people to jump. No fire engines, no one's trying to save us, just these goddamn photographers. And again it's sort of like I'm not a paparazzi, I'm not an, but again it was like I got the message loud and clear. Just you know if we get out of this. So it's a very long winded answer to the two stories that I think were the most important to me at the time.
Matt Jacob:And thank you for sharing. What about? I mean, we all love stories, but these stories are so visceral to you and the fact that you can recite them almost exactly as they happen means that, yeah, it seems that it's still so prominent in your mind. What was it about these types of projects? I mean, I know you were assigned these types of projects by, you know, an agency or a magazine and stuff like that, but these, obviously, these types, this type of photography really intrigued you, and it's still kind of focusing on your beginnings in photography. Were you just interested in taking any type of photos, or did you know that you were drawn to more of the storytelling, the documentary style of photography?
Rick Smolan:Definitely definitely storytelling. I mean I, I'm done, I, I don't know. I mean I, part of it is I. I was painfully shy when I was a kid. I was one of those. I had very few friends, I didn't had to talk to strangers. I remember even I mean it makes perfect sense I became a photographer because I used to observe and watch other people all the time, thinking if I watched other people I could learn how they did it. It felt like most people in their toolkit. As a human being, there was something that taught you how to relate to other people and it was just something left out of my toolkit. And I was so shy. I remember sitting.
Rick Smolan:I would go to the playground by myself at night and sit on the swings and I was like seven or eight old and I, I, I made up this bizarre story that I was sent here by aliens to observe life on earth, yeah, but not to interact uh, sort of like star trek. You know you're not allowed to actually, you know, interfere or interact with the culture or something. And and uh, I remember just wanting the aliens to come take me back because I just felt like I didn't belong here and it was. It was very painful as a kid, but that curiosity about other people, I think, was when I picked up camera for the first time. Suddenly I could talk to girls and I could find myself like the jocks wanted me there, the hippies wanted me there, the kids in the middle, everybody wanted me there because I made them look good and so I could seamlessly enter and then leave all these different groups of people. For years my wife accused me of being there but not being there. Like you know, the camera was my way of hiding in family events, like could you just put the camera down and be with us? But of course, everybody loves the pictures, right, and it was my way of interacting with the world. And I'm sure, as I've gotten to know many other photographers, it's a pretty common theme of being shy, but the camera giving you your superpower and you know, as I said, you know before. You know, and all these photographers who are competing are also it's also your family, right? So you know, even though we're trying to outdo each other all the time, the moment you're not shooting, that's the people that you know, care about you and look after you and that you can talk to about year, right, and so the only, the only sort of continuity is the other photographers that show up a lot of the same events.
Rick Smolan:So, um, one day where, um, I was with a group of photographers in Bangkok and, uh, it was like two in the morning and I'm not a big drinker, but most of my other photographer friends are, so if I wanted to hang out with them, it's in a bar and uh, they're all bitching and moaning about it. They hated their editors, they hated their magazines, and it was just sort of this bitch fest. And I said guys like this is the we have the best job in the world. Someone's paying us hundreds of dollars a day to rent Learjets and meet prime ministers and be the world's eyes. Like what could be a better job than this? And they said, well, kid, once you've been over here for a while, understand. They said understand what. And they said we want our pictures to change the world. We don't want it to document it, we want it. We want to change, want to shock people and move people. And and I didn't have a solution. But I said you know, you know it'd be really cool if a whole group of us could get together and descend on a country and do like a one day project in the life.
Rick Smolan:And I was living in Australia at the time. So I said, you know, we could do a day in the life of Australia. And the prime minister, you know, he brought me down there at the government's expense. Maybe the government could pay for the a hundred photographers to come. So you know, all my older, wiser friends said, yeah, kid, you, go organize it. We'll all come thinking that was the end of it. Yeah. So I tried. I went to 35 publishers. I said you know the world's best photographers, let loose One day. It'd be like the Olympics of photography in this incredible country. And every publisher said are you kidding? It'll cost a million dollars. Go buy stock photos and call it day in the life. Who would know that you didn't shoot the pictures or whatever? Who's ever going to check? Do it the size of a time magazine? Does the paper cheaper to print than that? I mean, it was every way to cheapen the idea and make it, you know, from an accountant's point of view instead of a journalist's point of view.
Rick Smolan:So I went back and met with the prime minister and I said look, I want to bring 100 photographers to Australia. It'd be great for Australia. And he said, rick, I don't have that kind of budget. He said I had enough money to bring you, and you know four or five people a year. But he said but, I'll help you. And I said you know, don't, don't be polite. And he said no, I'm going to help you. He said I'm going to set up meetings for you with the CEO of Qantas Australia, kodak, the CEO of Kodak Australia, the CEO of Hertz Australia, this guy, steve Jobs, starting this computer company. And I said why would I talk to all these business people? And he said, rick, you're going to ask them for free airline tickets and hotels and cars and computers. And I said they're just going to give this to me because I'm such a nice guy. He goes no, because you're going to put their logo on the first page of the book. You're going to say this book, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I said no, I'm a journalist, I can't do that. And he said right, it's like a PBS special.
Rick Smolan:This book was made possible through the generosity of these companies. So, um, to my astonishment, um, we couldn't raise any money, but we got airline tickets and hotels and um, and no cars. And Apple gave us computers and, uh, this is the Apple two. This is how long ago this was. Um, and we had a self-published bookublish the book.
Rick Smolan:No bookstore would take the book in Australia. Everybody just thought it was a joke. And so we found the Fairfax Group, which is the largest newspaper chain in Australia, and they offered the book exclusively. This was what they said. They said we'll do this if you give us the exclusive rights for two months. Like you can't sell it through any bookstores. Well, I couldn't get it into a bookstore, so it was like, don't throw me in the briar patch. It's like, oh, if you twist my arm. So, basically, we gave them a two month exclusive, but they had to buy 60,000 copies of the book before we even shot it. None of this makes any sense in retrospect, but it somehow it worked and it became the number one book in Australia.
Rick Smolan:Um, the funniest story was that, uh, people would actually have to either order it through a little coupon or go to the newspaper. And so, um, one of the newspaper groups, uh, so many people stole the sample copy of the book that was on the counter at the newspaper where you were going to buy it. They drilled a hole through the book, tied it to the desk and one day, when they went out to lunch and came back, someone had cut the rope with the book and the hole in it. I mean it was insane. This book became just a huge sensation. So I just wanted to go back to being a photographer, because this I could barely edit my expenses at the end of an assignment. So this was incredibly. The whole thing was a miracle that it all came together. We also did a one hour TV special about the making of it, which is like just to add another layer of insanity to it.
Rick Smolan:We raised no money but I sold, told the photographers if we ever got, if we, if the book ever sold well, not realizing it would we would pay everybody a thousand dollars and two years later we broke even. We paid off all the debt, but we were so in debt. I mean, Matt, I would have gone to jail if we. This book, this is like a bestseller, like, make this book a bestseller or you're going to jail. I was just signing, fine, I'll pay for this after the book comes out, knowing we would never be able to pay these bills. Um, I don't know if they have bankruptcy in Australia, but I just I had no idea how I was going to pay for any of this, but we couldn't back out at a certain point. We'd spent so much time and money and gotten so many people involved we couldn't call it off Um. So two years later I sent.
Rick Smolan:Every one of the star was a hundred a thousand dollars. So we actually spent um, you would think, spending a hundred thousand dollars. That was the proudest moment of my life. I think we actually got to pay everybody and I wanted to go back to being a photographer. But then the governor of Hawaii saw the book and called and said would you come to us? It's our anniversary of statehood. And then American Express called and said would you do Japan? We're fighting with the JCB credit card. And these books just became a phenomenon everywhere. It was the cover of Time, cover of Disney, cover of Fortune, og Perry Match, the London Sunday Times, every country where we ever did these books. I think people liked it because, as you said a few minutes ago, it's all about storytelling and watching, observing people. So anyway, I had nine cups of coffee today. So if you wonder why I'm so speedy, it's great, I feel so lucky.
Rick Smolan:It's just I'm so. I just, you know I pinch myself that um, yeah, I tell my kids I hope you find something. I can't wait to go to work every day. I mean it's just, it's an adventure. It's it's I'm always learning, I'm always trying to do things I haven't done before. I get bored really easily. I mean I I didn't realize what add was when I was a kid, but I definitely had it or have it. Um, I just need to be doing something different and new all the time, and and and I like being frightened. I mean I hate to say that, but I mean I like I'm much better when I'm in over my head. It's just, yeah, the adrenaline just kind of.
Matt Jacob:You know, somehow I learned better, um, so well, that's apparent in all of the stories you just shared with us and how you really kind of you know, formed your your your way through the photography world, certainly through your 20s, um, in the 80s, 90s. Fast forward to today and you still talk about excited to get up and go to work. Do you still work with agencies and magazines or did you break away from that? Tell us a little bit about what you do these days on a project basis.
Rick Smolan:The photo business is really awful right now. I have friends who were making incredibly good money four or five years ago and it's all just disappeared. I mean, between getting images and stock, I stock photo for side pictures for a dollar each, and the magazines, newspapers are dying, you know, people just aren't. I mean I can't even find a copy of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and most hotels that I go to these days. So I'm not working as a photographer anymore. I'm still. I'm still, I still.
Rick Smolan:I work with photographers. You know I love photographers. Um and um, yeah, I'm always looking for interesting projects for them. Uh, to work with photographers that I, you know, um, I mean, everybody I know is struggling right now. Um and uh, we've stopped doingto-day looks many, many years ago. I think there hasn't been one for probably over 20 years. I went from doing countries on a day to looking at topics like the first year of the Internet or the impact of the microprocessor, or the global water crisis or the world of big data, which are much more abstract and much kind of fun. To figure out how to photograph things that are very abstract and like the human face of big data was a really interesting project and the big data is basically the underpinnings of AI right, all this information and all these devices that we're all wearing and using all the time we're creating this sort of almost like a planetary nervous system.
Matt Jacob:How do we adapt to the? You know, you hit the nail on the head with the last four or five years, or even go as far to say the last 10 years, things as with the rise of social media, digitization, phones, all of the modernization that we are experiencing. Now, ai is thrown into it, and you talk about stock photography, which AI is essentially going to replace, depending on regulations, et cetera, et cetera. How do photographers in my generation and younger generations? How do we adapt? Where's the future? What does it look like and what should we be doing as photographers in terms of best practices?
Rick Smolan:I have a few friends that play with NFTs. That came out, came and went pretty quickly, uh, and my wife kept saying you know you should be. I was going to start a company for photographers to help them market their nfts and we actually developed a whole website and a whole marketing program and then literally I could see it was about to fall off a cliff and I it's the first time I've ever done a project where I just pulled the plug. I said no, this is not going to work. I've worked a lot with interactive media. Several of the books I've done originally we started. We were the first.
Rick Smolan:Apple was the first company ever put a CD-ROM into a computer and the first company to take CD-ROM out of a computer with the MacBook Air. And so when they first started marketing Macs with CD-ROMs, they actually put a CD-ROM that I created, called From Alice to Ocean, about Robin's trip. It was like 10 years after her trip and so every single Macintosh came with that and it won a lot of awards. But I also saw the interactive CDs were going to come and go very quickly, and the moment I saw the internet I realized CDs were dead, and so the last three books that we've done have been smartphone enabled, so you can actually point your phone at a photograph in the book and it plays a clip like a YouTube, a TED talk or a YouTube clip or a documentary or a commercial a Ted talk or a YouTube clip or a documentary or a commercial. So it it sort of weaves together the you know 600 year old medium of the book with the internet and really in a fascinating way. So again, I'm always looking at sort of what's coming next.
Rick Smolan:I don't know what with AI, it's, it's. I know people freaked out when Photoshop came along. They, oh my God, it's over photographers because now you can erase people. But AI is, like you know, this is a thousand, hundred thousand times more impactful because you don't need a photographer, you don't need to travel anymore and some of these pictures look awfully good. But there's a photographer named Philip Toledano who's doing wonderful work and he's not pretending they're real pictures. He's creating fictional histories, things that happened in the 40s, where sinkholes opened in New York and half the city fell in, and then I mean he's not trying to make it look like documentary photography, but it looks like something you couldn't take in with a real camera. He calls them fictional histories or something, but every week it's getting better and better and better, to the point where you know, now people have five fingers on their fingers, on their hands. Again, I liked some early versions of uh of AI.
Rick Smolan:Um, there's a, there's a group of us uh, it's called the photographer society, so it's a group of photographers. Anyone has done major stories for the national geographic, so we get together every year in Washington. The Geographic has their own sort of two-day storytelling seminar and we all meet the day before, and so the last two years I've actually brought people from the world of AI to Washington to talk to the photographers about what's coming, some of the tools that are out there. You know I don't make my living as a photographer. I haven't for a long time, so I'm not as scared by all this. I'm kind of more mesmerized by it.
Rick Smolan:But I mean it's sad. I have a lot of photographer friends who are making more money now giving lectures and doing workshops and even suing people for stealing their pictures, because you know people don't realize that if you see a picture online, even suing people for stealing their pictures, because you know people don't realize that if you see a picture online it doesn't mean you can just take it and use it. And so I have friends who, sadly, are making more money now suing for their pictures being misused, which is kind of a sad end to all this. I mean when it turns into the lawyers you know lawyers of love, you know. It's just sad that that's what you end up spending your time doing is chasing people, but I understand that these people have to make a living too, so what are you seeing out there?
Matt Jacob:Well, on the commercial aspect, I agree with you. It's becoming more difficult, not just with AI, but just with a growing or more saturated market. Generally, it's more accessible than ever for people to take photos. We're seeing a regression back to film as a trend whether that's a short-term trend or not, I don't know. The love for photography is bigger than ever, but the commercial opportunities are smaller than ever. So we've got this bottleneck situation is the way I see it, and I'm not worried about AI. I think AI is going to have its place and AI art is going to have its place.
Matt Jacob:I'm concerned about the regulation of it, and you just mentioned photographers suing others. You know that AI uses other people's photos to generate images, right, so it's how that's going to develop. I don't know, but'm still hopeful that photography still will always have a place for storytelling, for driving awareness, for just beauty, for just aesthetic art form. So I think, yeah, I am concerned about how people are going to make a living from it, and I don't think it's going to be possible to purely just be a photographer and make a comfortable living from it. I just don't see how that's.
Matt Jacob:That's why you're seeing many people adapt with what they do on social media what they do on. A lot of photographers might have a YouTube channel or a podcast or blogs and workshops, a lot of education, and that's positive. That's really nice to see that. You've got your lectures, you've got your workshops, you've got online course stuff. There's still a huge demand for people to, for people wanting to learn photography and get into it. So it's not that I think photography is dying, it's just the commercial opportunities are dwindling and that might be a permanent feature of the photography industry.
Rick Smolan:I don't know yeah, I mean it's funny. You think, with everybody having a camera in their pocket now and their iPhone, that, um, people would be. I mean, in some ways it has become a commodity because there's I mean, some ways there's some statistics, like you know, of all the pictures taken throughout history. Um, until now, uh, this year, more than we're taking, like you know, like 50% of all pictures taken ever were taken in the last six months or something.
Rick Smolan:The other thing that I thought about was that, you know, photography itself is almost 200 years old. I mean, I think maybe it's about 180 years old right now, since the ability for the human race, for civilization, to record ourselves, and before it was painting, and of course, photography is really looked down upon when it first came out and sort of cheap painting. But, you know, if you think of all the time that human beings have been on earth, on a 24 hour clock, photography existed like one second to midnight of that 24 hour clock and and so there's this little tiny narrow window where we could actually photograph what we call reality before it's all being interpreted by painters and other things, and now suddenly we're coming out the other side of that with ai and all this other technology that's.
Matt Jacob:That's uh affecting everything um, so I think you're much like myself as a bit of a techno. You know, enjoy embracing technology and while fearful of it and you talked about kind of embracing fear earlier it's still there for us to utilize, even as photographers. Certainly don't shy away from that. And it's reminiscent, I guess, of something one of your projects about big data, or at least a raising awareness about big data. I'm really interested in that project. Can you give me an oversize to kind of what came about from that and a little bit of details about that project you put together?
Rick Smolan:Right. So I was fortunate to go to the TED conference for many years and I kept reading it to Marissa Mayer, who was the CEO of Yahoo, who's an old friend I'd known her since she was started at google a million years ago and she said you know, what are you working on? I said, you know, nothing's really grabbing my attention lately. And she said have you thought about doing a book about big data? And I said what's that? And she said well, you know, we're a lot of us are starting to think that the planet's developing a nervous system with all these devices. You know, we've got these phones and we've got, you know, apple watches and jawbones and Fitbits, and it's almost like there's this data flowing around the world that's giving us literally the planet is like starting to wake up. I said well, that's really interesting. And she said maybe you should look at that. So you know, people said how are you going to photograph big data? Is it like pictures of the Facebook, you the Facebook data center, with the lights blinking on it? Obviously not. The book was absolutely mesmerizing and very emotional, actually, because it sounded like it'd be kind of cold-blooded.
Rick Smolan:There was a gentleman named Deb Roy, who this is how some of these stories end up in our books. I was at a conference. He was sitting next to me, it was about 30 people, this little technology conference, and he said, oh, you're the guy that does those day in the life books. I said, well, a long time ago. And he said can I show you something I've been working on? And it was the lunch break. And he said, yeah, when my son was born, I did all these videos of him and I thought, oh my God, I'm going to get stuck throughout the whole lunch period looking at this guy's TV pictures. And then he showed me the most extraordinary he put cameras in the ceiling of every room in his house the day his son was born and for two years he recorded every moment of his son's life like terabytes of data. And he said he said I'm a scientist. And he said I basically was trying to figure out how children learn to speak. And he said well, how do you think people learn to speak? I said repetition. The more times you hear a word, you, he said, that's whatever he thought. Turns out that it's actually context. The more different places a child hears the word, the faster that word emerges. He said we call it the birth of a word, and the graphics he showed me were just extraordinary.
Rick Smolan:We not only did this human face, we did a book, we also did a one hour PBS TV special. Don't want to win the Boston Film Festival Award for best cinematography. My younger brother, who's a film director, directed it and the whole the whole movie and the whole book just gave you goosebumps. It talked about the BRCA3 gene that tells a woman if she's likely to develop breast cancer. So there are women that are having pro what do you call it? That they're having their breasts removed before they have any sign of cancer. Based on this information, which is like wow, that's incredible. That's like wow, that's incredible there were so many stories and they were using elephant seals, where they put cameras on the elephant seals and GPS devices so they could track where animals go, where they migrate.
Rick Smolan:The book we had all these wonderful essays, people predicting some of the terrible things that have now happened with social media. But all of this, this whole world of measuring things and being able to it, still amazes me that you can dial a phone number and you can reach one person anywhere on earth like that. Everybody's got, almost got like they did. I know this sounds so commonplace now to all of us, but it's so miraculous for someone. You grew up at a time where star trek was magic. You know where you could have your little flip device and bones would talk to Captain Kirk. We all take this for granted now. The fact that I can have my Dick Tracy wristwatch and call my wife, the fact that I can talk to my computer. Now I love this stuff.
Rick Smolan:I can see the dangers of it. I worry with the political situation of what's happening here in the United States right now, of the wrong people having their control of this technology of surveillance and you know my father used to talk about the pendulum swinging back and forth and that sometimes it's the Republicans and sometimes it's the Democrats. My worry right now, the thing that frightens me the most, is that the people who are about to get their hands on this technology are people that, in my opinion, are very dangerous, and I don't think there's any morals, any scruples, anything that keeps them from misusing that technology, both in terms of spying on their competition and jailing people. They don't like stifling criticism, treating the media like the enemy. So I think we're in a really dangerous time right now, but I also, as a glass half full person, I keep hoping that somehow the technology, this technology, will allow people to overcome the dark clouds that we see forming not only a month or so away from now.
Matt Jacob:Uh, here in the states. What about photography in that role? Can can photography, does it still have a place to drive change to, to drive awareness?
Rick Smolan:the problem now is the filter bubble. I remember years ago somebody at ted getting on stage and he said my wife and I both went to google the other day and we both typed in the same search terms and we were sitting by each other and we're stunned to find out that we got completely different results. And this is the problem now is that I have people in America who never heard about Project 2025 because they watch Fox News all day. They don't even they didn't know what it was. And, um, you know, there used to be a picture. You know, Nick Utt's picture of the, the, the little girl running, uh in Vietnam changed the way that Americans viewed that war. Eddie Adams' picture of the street shooting changed people the way people saw that war. The guy stopping the tank in Tiananmen Square Square Stuart Franklin's picture.
Rick Smolan:There have been pictures that have had the power to totally change the way the entire world views things, and my worry now is that having this control over what people see, or people choosing to only see the things that reconfirm their pre-existing beliefs, means these pictures will never even get seen to change people's minds and, in fact, pictures will be manufactured. Did you see that picture that was floating around a few months ago, when there were floods in the United States, of a little girl with a dog in a rescue canoe on the water. It was totally an AI picture, and one of the Republican senators who had been putting this on his website, talking about how FEMA had not been helping children or some horse shit, was confronted on TV saying you know, that picture that you keep promoting is completely fabricated. He says I don't care. It makes the point that I believe is true. I mean, he didn't even care that the picture was fabricated. And I think this is the danger now is that, as I said, there was that 180 year period where we kind of believe what photographs were of reality and, yes, it was a person's perspective. It was the lens they used, it was what they chose to photograph or not photograph. It was the editors that chose which pictures to feature and which ones not, but at least it was based on reality and the fact that now you can generate photographs.
Rick Smolan:There was another photographer I think it was also Philip Toledano, who just do you know Robert Capa, right? So Robert Capa was obviously one of the great you know photojournalistsnalists and the father of Magnum. So Philip recently made the comment that Robert Kappa was one of the three photographers around the landing in Normandy when the Americans fought back against the Germans on the beach and most of them were a massacre. When he shipped his film back to New York, the guy in the lab screwed it up and there were only three frames that were even visible on the roll of film and they had to be rescued. And so Philip decided to create what he thought would have been on the rest of that roll and he admitted. He said these are fabricated and the pictures are fascinating, interesting. Some of them look like they could have been on that roll of film.
Rick Smolan:He tried to make them blurry and fuzzy and grainy, but again, you know, photography is writing with light, right, that's what it means. You know photography, right, it's already with light. Well, this isn't ready with light anymore, it's ready with words. It's imagination. This isn't ready with light anymore, it's ready with words, it's imagination. We're almost going back to painting. We're going back. It's like a new art form, but it shouldn't be called photography. If somebody was calling it photography, F-A-U-X photography, like you know, make-believe photography. There have been efforts on the part of some companies like Adobe to put some kind of mortar mark so that you can tell that a picture has been manipulated. But the average person is not going to pay attention to that. It's like you know, nobody looks at the copyright symbol under a photograph until they're being sued for using it. So I'm sounding like Demi Downer here.
Matt Jacob:Yeah, it's a little bit depressing, Rick.
Rick Smolan:Yeah, I know, but it's a new medium and I think it needs to be treated like a new medium and not treated as if it's a form of photography. It's not a form of photography.
Matt Jacob:Totally agree. Yeah, I mean the argument could be that real photography becomes even more valuable once this kind of plays out and we see how this I mean we're still going through this, we're still at the beginning of going through this phase and this change, so we don't really know, kind of, how it's going to settle. But you know, there is the argument that you know real photographers, real photography. If there's some way that we can delineate the two very clearly on a legal and reality perspective, which in journalism is, I think, going to be borderline impossible, you know, with the amount of misinformation, disinformation and kind of negative desires of certain people in power to use these types of images to, as you said, to confirm their bias, yeah, I mean there's for us kind of purists or for us people that kind of want to do photography for just the love of it.
Rick Smolan:I think there is, there's still, there will be a place for even higher value for real, real photography. But that's just a guess. I, because some of the stuff that's happening with Sora and these other tools where, oh my God, you can actually I mean someone's going to direct a feature length film which is all created through AI in the next year. I bet anything that this is going so fast. And someone said to me the other day that AI is as bad as it's ever going to be right now. I went what do you mean he goes right now? I went what do you mean he goes? It's right now.
Rick Smolan:We're in the we're the caveman era of this stuff and I mean like we're worried about the versatility of still photographs. But I can make you say anything now. I could. I could take this conversation, feed it into an ai and then have you say the human massacring people in bali, and, and it would look like you said that. And this is that. It's so weird, isn't it that, just as trump, who you know, lies it when he breathes that this technology is emerging at the exact same time, right, just just as somebody who has no, uh, you know, compunction about making things up lying and just bare face lies all the time. And yet this technology is is emerging at the exact same moment as you have sort of a madman, like that, just really it's. It's fascinating how these, like cultural, this technology and this you know sort of psychopath are overlapping in such a dangerous way, you know and, and now it's now it's's the problem that my opinion is worth as much as your fact.
Matt Jacob:Right? It's like there's no such thing as a fact anymore, it seems. How have we even got to this stage, whether it's on a photographic level or just political level?
Rick Smolan:That your facts can outweigh all the science in the world, because the science are all like. Every single scientist in the world is corrupt because they believe that global warming is happening.
Matt Jacob:Yeah, all institutions are corrupt.
Rick Smolan:Yeah, right, I mean all this is. Unfortunately, it's the playbook, it's the despot playbook, and we've seen this repeat over and over again throughout history and you would think that having access to more information would have made it harder for people. But in fact, everybody's got an opinion now, right, and you don't even know what. The thing that you forward because it was funny or shocking, is the thing that has the value, right, so the good news doesn't get forwarded, but the shocking, outrageous, scandalous they eat cats and dogs. Oh, it's very funny. We're going to forward it to all of our friends. My wife and I disagree with this. I keep saying that repetition in advertising everybody in advertising will tell you the number of times someone sees a product adds up to them wanting to buy that product. And I keep saying Trump and all these other people who just want attention somehow it ends up paying off, even though you'd think that what they're getting attention for is so horrendous. But it's just that repetition over and over and over again.
Matt Jacob:Well, you become normalized to it and then you start telling yourself that it's fine and, yeah, I, I, I don't know. Yeah, it's a real kind of seminal period for, for the us especially, but for the, for the world, I mean so much so it's for the whole planet of, of course, you know we're here, so I'm seeing it here, but I mean, the whole world seems to be leaning in this direction now.
Matt Jacob:Well, and also the cross-pollination effects of the political system in the US. Right, you guys are the most powerful country in the world and everything that happens over there. You have all these ripple effects, not to mention setting examples, right?
Rick Smolan:If these types of things can happen in the US, well, that means that's a green light for the rest of us in the world, all the other despots that want to get into power. We're all coming to Bali. I'm just warning you now. You don't come. Now it's pouring with rain, but yeah, you're welcome anytime.
Matt Jacob:Let's kind of find, I mean, I haven't even touched upon most of the things I wanted to.
Rick Smolan:Yeah, but let's come out of this.
Matt Jacob:Tell me about how you're. I know, kind of just knowing your work and knowing what you've done and now speaking today, that a lot of passion behind all of these stories and now kind of cultural movements, cultural projects, political movements, a lot of these are so important to you, quite rightly. How does that play into, against All Odds, and the company that you're CEO of and producing these types of stories? How do you choose what you want to go with and how do you choose what to curate and produce and where to go with all of this?
Rick Smolan:Well, the last book that we did is called the Good Fight America's Ongoing Struggle for Justice, which is very appropriate given our conversation, and it was the first book that I've done, that I've worked on, where, instead of sending out photographers to take a racial photography, we actually look back through the history of the last hundred years in America and it was really fascinating. Again, this came out of a conversation I had at TED with the head of the Anti-Defamation League, jonathan Greenblatt, and he said that he said have you ever thought of, actually, if you look at how different the world is now for Muslims, jews, women, disabled community, the black community, latino American community from 100 years ago through today? If you look at it through photography and essays and statistics, it's really remarkable how much has changed in 100 years and it might be really valuable to remind people of this trajectory. You know the Martin Luther King, you know the history sort of leaning towards the to the upside, and it was for me it was like going to school. I mean I couldn't. There was so much of my own history, my country's history, that I had no idea that women were only given the right to vote in 1910. When I was in college, when I graduated in 1972, I didn't realize that the girls in my class couldn't get a credit card unless their father or brother signed for it 1972. I mean, that's like shocking to me.
Rick Smolan:It turned out there was something that used to be called the ugly laws in the United States, that if you were disabled and your physical appearance made other people uncomfortable, that your family was supposed to hide you away or walk you away. And now like 4 billion people watch the Paralympics. Now, having an orthotic leg four billion people watched the Paralympics. Now having an orthotic leg is like a jockey is featuring soldiers with, you know, orthotic legs as heroes, and so there's so much that has changed so dramatically. I just, you know America's 250th anniversary is coming up in a couple of years and I was thinking it'd be interesting to actually do some kind of interactive traveling exhibit based on this book. I'm trying to do something right now which is totally different, which is not even photography based. I was an. Did you read much science fiction when you were growing up?
Matt Jacob:No, I don't really. I wasn't science fiction, Okay.
Rick Smolan:I was just again this is my escapism as a kid, but there was a book. There was a book I read over and over again called Tunnel in the Sky by Robert Heinlein, and it was a time in the future where Earth is super polluted, immigrants everywhere, you can't breathe the air, the water's dirty, there's plastics everywhere and they found a way to get to other planets through something called tunnels. So if you imagine Grand Central Station instead of train tracks, they're like wormholes, every one of those tracks. You walk through it and you pop out someplace else in the galaxy. And this is actually.
Rick Smolan:The book was written in the fifties, but it was actually quite prophetic in lots of ways. And so every teenager on earth competes every year to get into this group that gets to colonize new planets. And if you get a planet, your family can leave earth and migrate with you. So it's like migrating off of earth. And so every year there's a graduation exercise where the best teenagers on earth get sent to a planet. It's the test planet and you're allowed to take one weapon and you just have to survive for 72 hours. And it's not meant, they don't want to kill the kids. These are the kids that are going to be the future of humanity, but they want to wait on any kids that aren't the strongest, and so this book, which I love, was about this one group of kids that goes through these tunnels. You go through a minute and a mile apart. If you can find your friends, you can team up. Various things happen. They find some of their classmates dead, blah, blah, blah, and then the tunnel never reopens and so they went thinking it was going to be 72 hours. They don't know why. At first they think maybe they're on Earth and it's a part of the test. And then the clouds clear and there's five moons and three suns, and so I bought the rights to this book 30 years ago.
Rick Smolan:I've met the author and then I tried going to Hollywood and I had so many meetings and again this felt like the early day in the life books, where everybody's laughing at me, saying you folks are always laughing at me, saying you're such a rube, you know, um. And then, um, someone said to me you need to. You need to find partners that actually have credibility in hollywood. So I've partnered with a guy named miles dale who was guillermo del toro's partner. They did shape of water and pinocchio and hellboy, all these wonderful uh movies and then, uh, then we've now partnered with a guy who's a showrunner, um, andrew shambles, and so we've, um, we're in the middle of now negotiating with some of the streamers and two of them have said they want to do it.
Rick Smolan:So, um, my, my role is just to contribute ideas. I'm not the writer. I own, I own the, the, you know the, the book, the rights to the book, theatrical rights to the book, but, um, it's really scary and fun and interesting and all the pitches that we did, you know, we pitched Amazon and Hulu and Disney and Apple and Netflix, of course, and it used to be. You did this in person, and now it's ever since COVID, it's all, it's all this it's it's all virtual. So it was really fun sort of watching the reactions of people's faces and learning how you pitch that, something like this in half an hour, and now we're trying to turn into a multi-season tv series, um, so fingers crossed you're really good at pitching.
Matt Jacob:Is there something I I you know a few features of your career. One is kind of the the collaboration side of things, which you know it's exuded in most of the projects you've done and that's the way you photograph. The other thing that really comes across to me is the way you can get sponsors, work with big corporations to provide, you know, accessibility and finances for certain big projects and clearly you have this way of connecting with big corporations and CEOs of companies and big Fortune 500 companies who are able to sponsor things and, in this case, streamers and production companies and other people like that. What is the secret For lowly individual photographers like myself, many of our audience, and we want to kind of pitch? Maybe we want to pitch a project to a brand or to a government institution? Give us some insights. What is the success?
Rick Smolan:get 20 minutes of the CEO's time. Don't ask for $50,000 because you just wasted his or her time. I mean you kind of want to walk in with a really big idea. The problem is, if you meet with anybody else other than the CEO, they're listening to your pitch, saying is this good for my career or bad? They're not hearing is this good for my company or not? The first thing they're thinking is if I say yes to this, am I going to be praised or punished or lose my job or be promoted when, if you're talking to the CEO, he or she could basically, you know, whatever the amount of money that you're asking for is kind of pocket change for that. I mean it's a couple of million dollars. And so I just find if you walk in with a really big idea and you get their imagination going, even if they say no, they won't forget the meeting. And I don't mean to make it sound easy. I mean, for everyone that says yes, I'd probably talk to 30 people and say no. And I also am kind of relentless. I mean I'm not obnoxious but I'm persistent.
Rick Smolan:The other thing is John Scully told me this. John used to be the CEO of Apple and I knew him a long time ago. He was a friend, but he was incredibly supportive of our projects in the early years. We used to. In fact, when I didn't have very much money to pay the photographers, I went to John and I said can I pay the photographers with Macintoshes instead of cash? I have a thousand dollars to be a photographer, but I'd like to give them a Mac, a printer and a ton of software. So give them like a $3,000 package. So we actually got the first Macs into Time Live, newsweek, national Geographic, all came in through the back door. We gave almost 1,000 Macs away. We didn't give them away but we used them as payment. Use them as payment not only to the photographers but all the editors, all the picture editors.
Rick Smolan:And people said, well, I'm a photographer, what would I do with a computer? At the beginning. And then, the moment they had it, it was like wow, because they all thought they were going to turn around and sell it and just make $2,000, right, because it was a $3,000 package. But the moment they had it, they all started saying, oh, I can use this to write letters, and I can. I. There were so many. It's a way before you can even transmit photographs. Now it's, it's. It's extraordinary.
Rick Smolan:But John told me something really interesting. He said if you ever want to get weak to CEO, the only day of the week that you can penetrate their force field is 7am on a Sunday morning. And I said what do you mean? He says? He said it's the only day of the week that most CEOs will still read their own emails, because their secretaries, their assistants, their handlers, their screeners don't work on Sundays usually. I don't know if this is still true, but I found when I want to reach out to somebody now with LinkedIn, it's fantastic. I'd say I have about an 80% hit rate if I reach out to somebody on a Sunday morning. I told John. I said that was the best advice anybody ever gave me, because they can't help but check their email and then and then of course, they're writing. An email is also in our form, which I. You have to keep relearning all the time because, like, if you put too much in the email, they just tune out. So you have to say enough to make them want to actually hear more.
Matt Jacob:And in the attention economy, we have to capture their attention immediately, right.
Rick Smolan:It's so hard, I know. And also people say, well, you know, why would I want to do a book? Books are so old fashioned, it's so, you know, it's like another. That's like you know who's going to look at a book and I say, okay, who's going to find a website from two years ago? These books are still sitting. We did a book called One Digital Day, where we showed the impact of the microprocessor and Intel sponsored it and I said, we're not going to put, we're going to put your competition in here. It's not about, it's about the impact of the microprocessor, not about Intel's impact. And they gave 150,000 copies of the book away to their employees, to CEOs, to world leaders and those books. We did that book 20 years ago and it's still sitting. When I go to Intel, it's still sitting in the waiting rooms. So I said, yes, it's old fashioned, but it's also physical and you know, so much of our lives now are digital and something that that that that sits in your coffee table is, you know, amazing there's.
Rick Smolan:I'll tell you one more story which is related to this. I gave a talk at a high school in San Francisco again 25 years ago and this kid came up to me with a box of yellow, a Kodak box of prints, and it reminded me so much of myself. This kid was, his name is Josh Hainer, and he asked if he could intern for us and we didn't really have any work. We said, okay, you know, fine, come, you can get coffee and run errands and stuff. And so every summer for the next three years he interned for us. Then he went to Stanford, graduated top of his class you know, it was like the valedictorian of his class and he came back and he worked for us on one of our projects called America 24-7. We hired a. I first sent them over. The United States was a week long project and my daughter had just been born. Josh said give a picture of your daughter. I said, yeah, why? She says give me a picture of Femi. So I gave him a picture of Femi. I'm going to actually show you the picture. So the next day he walks in my office and there is my daughter on the cover of the book. But it's got the reviews of the New York Times, it's got the logo of the book. And I said wait, how did you do this? He said I wrote the software. I found the vendors. We can deliver these to people for $5 and 65 cents, including postage, heard about it and she got. She held it up on on her favorite things program and 80 000 people tried uploading pictures of their dogs, their cats, their weddings, their parents. Waiting for 40 years ago it became this nationwide sensation.
Rick Smolan:Josh went on to win the pulitzer prize in photography. Uh when, when that bombing happened in boston, you know, during the the uh the marathon, he ended up photographing. He was assigned with side with the New York Times. He got hired by the New York Times because he met one of the editors working on our project. We all fell in love with him. He's incredibly talented and just a wonderful human being. But I was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge one day and he called. He said are you sitting down? I said well, I'm in my car. Why? He? And he said I got to tell you something. He said I just won the Pulitzer Prize in photography. So I felt like he wasn't my kid, but I felt like one of my children had won the Pulitzer Prize and this book became the number one book in the United States because of Josh.
Rick Smolan:I mean, the book was great, but that gimmick of personal. It was the first time a New York Times bestselling book was mass customized by the, by the, by the audience, by the, by the readers. Um, so, again, I, I, I, I'm, I'm always experimenting and playing with things. Um, I, I my wife says I over complicate things, which is true, right, it's sort of you know, featureitis. I keep adding and then, like we did a book, the book we did about did about the good fight, america's ongoing struggle for justice. We were supposed to include 20 videos in the book. You know where 20 pictures would trigger videos. We ended up putting 63 in the book because we couldn't help ourselves. It was just. It was just there were so many good videos to include. The videos were heartwarming and just really moving and fascinating and things. Again, you want readers to say I've got to show this to my brother or my sister or my parents or my spouse, something that gets your emotions involved.
Matt Jacob:How do we do that? As we wrap up here, how do we leave the audience with ideas on? You talked about the good fight. It's probably a good, good way to an analogy to to ask this question. But how do we, how do we keep up the good fight? How do we, how do we um drive stories that matter to us as photographers, as people, how do we kind of keep keep pursuing authenticity and and stories that really drive change?
Rick Smolan:I think that's a good question. I think it's the same question that has always been there for storytellers. I think if a star tells me they're waiting to get an assignment before they do something, they're the wrong person. I mean, I always use the assignments as a way of getting anywhere in the world and then, once I got there, I'd enterprise and find my own stories that I thought were interesting. And I think I think if I'm an editor and I want to hire a photographer, I want somebody who shows me what they've done for themselves. I want a passion project, right? I want someone to come in and say this is a story I've been doing because I think it's important, and then I'll give the work for things I I need them to photograph. But I mean I want to see somebody comes at that same story from all these different angles, um and um.
Rick Smolan:I don't find enough people doing that. I mean people are looking through again. This is the the short attention span world we live in, where everyone's a great, one single singular photograph on instagram, right or tiktok or whatever. Um and I. I find it really rare for someone to put in months and months and months of work into one story. It has to be something you really care about. I mean, some people have just done a parent was dying, you know, it's it's that they don't have to go to someplace else in the world. It's just, it's a's a. It's a really powerful, poignant story. There's gosh, there's so many things I wish I could, you know, add to give pointers to people of stories that have moved me, that other photographers have done. I mean, we can add this at the end of like in your show notes or something.
Rick Smolan:But there's a couple of stories that I think were just so again, I just admire the photographer so much who did that, those things, and I think there's always room for that. I think there will always be space for people that do their own personal projects that then it because they're so excited about it, they find an audience, a community for it. But that's the other thing right now is. I was just at the perry uh photo book Book Fair last month, or not Book Fair, the Perry Photo Exposition and it was just wonderful walking around and seeing people from all different countries and how they're. You know there's a whole section of books on the top level where there were little publishers where they printed 500 copies of a book, and some of these books were just mesmerizing. They're so wonderful and and there's some you know, the books are not cheap. But there, there, there seems to be a growing community of people that are supporting these small publishers, which I think is really really wonderful too.
Matt Jacob:I think there is and I think there are. There are still so many people out there who who are finding a voice through their camera and through books, a lot of people getting fed up with the short form age that we live in, and certainly photographers who are able to find the smaller publishers or self-publish if they can, and really find fulfillment Kickstarter, yeah, crowdfunding, whatever it might be, and I think that's a great lesson. Certainly, to end on is just find something that you believe in, find something that you are passionate, that you want to tell and, like you said, it could be anything, it could be in your own home or it could be the other side of the world, but for anyone who's viewing that and seeing the end product, that passion will always come through and that belief in that, that desire to tell that story, will always come through, rather than taking someone else's.
Rick Smolan:Actually, I'll leave you with one other thought, which is when I was 16, also, my dad gave me a book of photographs by Elliot Erwitt, and Elliot is just an extraordinary photographer. I ended up marrying this daughter years later, um and uh, but he was my inspiration and, uh, he had an exhibit. Uh, he unfortunately passed away last year at uh 85, but um, he, uh, um. His pictures were funny, moving, and you know, when you look at the Mona Lisa and it remakes up a story of what the smile is.
Rick Smolan:Elliot's pictures were like that, like everybody made up their own stories, and they were enigmatic enough that you felt you got to participate in the photograph. So any of the audience that's listening, if you want to see pictures that are just mesmerizing, look at any of the work by Elliot Irwin, and he did this over and over again. You'd think these are lucky pictures, but then when you see he got hundreds of them and he was never making fun of people, but he was amused by humanity and I also found out he was also shy. So that sort of echoed with me too.
Matt Jacob:Wonderful Well, thank you so much for sharing such I feel like we need to have another episode called Rick's stories right so maybe we'll do that one day and, um, thank you for your patience with uh with getting this together, because we've gone back and forth in my visits with uh to New York and we haven't quite made it happen, which has been mainly on on my side. But thanks for being flexible, thanks for joining me and in your evening time and I look forward to chatting with you again and hopefully meeting you one day in person.
Rick Smolan:Yeah, definitely Thanks, man Take care.
Matt Jacob:Thanks.
