Rick Smolan was a photographer for his college newspaper when a professor introduced him to Time Magazine. “Time,” he says, “gave me assignments I had no qualifications for. Every time they sent me out, it went quickly from ‘oh my god, this is so cool!’ to ‘oh my god, I’m gonna screw this up!’”
Adam Driver and Rick Smolan Toronto Film Festival 2014.
“I'm not religious, but there were so many times where I've completely screwed something up, and at the last minute somebody rescued my ass.”
Perhaps his most famous photo came from perhaps his most colossal screw up.
A Colossal Screw Up
“Time sent me to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota after two FBI agents were killed there. It was a huge story and the killers were still at large. But I got lost and missed the press conference that I was supposed to shoot and I thought ‘great, I’ll never get hired again.’ So I slink off to some coffee shop, and–mind you–I was on the totally wrong side of this huge reservation to begin with. So I’m sitting there with my head in my hands, thinking my career’s over, wanting to shoot myself and this guy leans over and says, ‘Hey, are you a photographer?’ And I say ‘Yeah,’ and he asks ‘are you here to cover the FBI shootout?’ I tell him the truth: ‘Yeah, but I totally fucked it up. I missed the press conference. My career is over.’ He asks, ‘Can I trust you?’”
Watch Rick Smolan
It turned out the guy was a stringer for National Public Radio. “I know one of the two guys accused of killing the FBI agents,” he confessed to Smolan. “He's innocent, and he's about to appear at Mount Rushmore five minutes from here. Do you wanna come with me? You'll be the only photographer there.”
Dennis Banks in front of Mt. Rushmore.
That photo of a defiant Dennis Banks with four granite-faced American Presidents looking on behind him ran all over the world. “That radio guy saved my entire career.”
So Many Things Could Go Wrong
Life as a photojournalist was tenuous to begin with.
“I was ten years younger than everyone else in the field, so luckily, they adopted me in all our downtime, and showed me the ropes. So many things could go wrong. They taught me how to handle light and manipulate exposure. And this is all pre-digital, so we had no idea if the film stock we bought had been refrigerated, X-rayed or baked in some truck. We didn’t know if it was defective or if there was dust in the camera that would scratch the film, or if a courier would damage it on the way back to New York. It was crazy and haphazard. We’d find stewardesses to fly containers of film back to the city. I mean two or three months of work handed to a stranger to hand to ‘Richie,’ our taxi driver at JFK, who’d take it into Manhattan. It was a miracle that these photos ever made it back to magazines. And after all that, you never knew if by the time they got there, the photos might be irrelevant.”
Having Fun
Smolan has gone on to forge a historic and innovative career, launching the mass market for large format illustrated books with his “A Day in the Life” series and teaming up with Ridley Scott to create “Life in a Day,” the first user-generated feature-length documentary shot on a single day.
Camel in Australia for book from Alice to Ocean.
He has trekked across the Australian Outback (funded by a Kickstarter campaign) and was especially honored for “The Good Fight: America’s Ongoing Struggle for Justice,” which captured the struggles of Americans who have experienced hatred, oppression or bigotry. The book rocketed to Amazon’s Top 100 books within a week and went on to win numerous awards.
“I love it. I’m an adrenaline junkie. It’s not like I have some secret technique except maybe just sitting with people for a long time and allowing them to revert to who they are, forgetting I was there. But I definitely never had a plan! You just experiment all the time. And sometimes, you just get lucky. That's what's so much fun about being a photographer.”
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