America, Moment by Moment

Rick Smolan ’72 shapes the largest collaborative
photography project ever

By Barbara Snyder Stambaugh

It’s September. Photojournalist Rick Smolan ’72 is charged up. His new book, America 24/7, won’t be released for another month, but he’s just learned that The Wall Street Journal will run a major story about it a few days hence.

“Is this good news?” he asks himself out loud. “I don’t know.”

He’s thinking.

“They’re running the story a month early to scoop The New York Times and Forbes. What if the book seems like old news by the time it’s released?”

Before he can decide whether he’s elated or ticked off about this turn of events, he learns that the book’s sales rank on Amazon.com has doubled overnight.

“Now it’s 3,000?” he says to someone who has walked into his Sausalito, Calif., office. “It was 6,000 yesterday. That’s good.”

Rick Smolan (left) and David Cohen also collaborated on the best-selling "Day in the Life" series.

October rolls around. One week before its release date American 24/7 is featured on the CBS News program Sunday Morning, and the book climbs on the Amazon charts. In November, Oprah features the book, and the ranking jumps to No. 13. In December the book reaches No. 6 on the New York Times Best-Seller List. This project—this big, crazy idea—is a bona fide hit. After all, we’re talking about a $50 coffee-table book. This is not the sort that usually rockets up the charts.

Big, crazy projects are what Smolan does best. He lives and works at a sprinter’s pace, breathlessly chasing down the next big idea, traveling the globe and bringing back its wonders in some of the most gorgeous photographs ever taken. He sends legions of other photographers on missions to do the same. He finds ways to use cutting-edge technology in startling ways. When publishers tell him an idea won’t fly, he does it anyway and, of course, it flies.

As a result, Smolan hasn’t just changed the surfaces of our coffee tables; he’s changed the way we look at our world, our communities, our very selves.

His career, in brief: He first made his mark as a photojournalist freelancing for the biggies—Time, Life and National Geographic—and then became frustrated that he couldn’t choose the photos that appeared in print. So he became his own editor, creating A Day in the Life of Australia and a whole series by the same name, including books on Japan, Hawaii, the USSR, Canada, Spain, California and the United States.

He finally grew weary of the project and sold his Day in the Life production company to Rupert Murdoch in 1986. Next he published From Alice to Ocean, the first photography book to include a CD-ROM, then others, like Passage to Vietnam and 24 Hours in Cyberspace. In all, he’s had a hand in 70 books, give or take, including the 53 he’s working on right now. (You read that right—53 books are in active production.)

America 24/7 is Smolan’s most ambitious project by a long shot. From May 12 to 18, 2003, Smolan sent 4,000 professional photographers and another 20,000 amateurs on a mission to capture America, moment by moment. Together, they took one million digital pictures—the largest collaborative photography project in history.

The logistics are unimaginable. A million digital photo files, all arriving at once, and a million decisions about which ones to use.

“It’s been wild,” Smolan says. “It reminds me of watching people jump off a cliff and hoping they can build a parachute on the way down. We’re a group of masochists. But this is the best thing we’ve ever done.”

America 24/7 is more than a bunch of pretty pictures. There is something special here, a reason why this project gathered so much momentum—a reason born, perhaps, in those confusing days after Sept. 11, 2001, as average Americans sat down to wonder, “Why do they hate us?”

“Americans are pissed off about how we are perceived around the world,” Smolan says. “Maybe it’s the government or the media. We look ugly. I think this project took off because Americans wished they could tell their own story. This is it. This is us.”

Even though America 24/7 contains 300 pages and 900 photographs, this country’s story is too big to tell inside one book. So next fall, Smolan will release another 52 separate volumes in the “24/7” series—one for each state plus New York City and Washington, D.C., and he’ll release them all in the same day … another first in publishing.

“It’ll be interesting,” Smolan says, laughing. “There’s nothing like a hanging to focus your attention.”

If Smolan were to tell his own story, chapter one might start with his first big project, the one that paved the way for the rest and, he says, the one that set the tone and style for most everything that has come after. The 1972 Dickinson College yearbook.

“Prof. Dennis Akin helped me to create my own photography major in fine arts. I had time to teach myself and, then, show him my work. When I left Carlisle, I took the yearbook to New York City. Today I can’t imagine a young photographer walking into my office with a yearbook. I hope I’d be polite. But that’s what I did. It was like talking my way past the palace guards. I took my yearbook to the offices of Life magazine.”

He left there with a job. And the rest is not just photographic history, it’s publishing history, American history, even world history—all told through pictures.

Forget the world, though. What Smolan’s really proud of is a baby announcement.

“For 20 years, we’ve been having books instead of babies,” he says of his partnership with wife Jennifer Erwitt. Now they have two children, Phoebe, 3, and Jesse, 1, and the birth announcement for his oldest includes 12 digital photos.

“It’s called ‘A Year in the Life of Phoebe,’ ” he says. “It’s really something. •

This isn’t the first time that Rick Smolan has graced the pages of Dickinson Magazine. To read more about his work, check out these articles from the summer 1993 and spring 1997 issues.

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