Rick Smolan
Rick Smolan
Rick Smolan is a former TIME, LIFE and National Geographic photographer best known as the co-creator of the "Day in the Life" book series. He is currently CEO of Against All Odds Productions, a cross-media organization which utilizes the skills of hundreds of the world's leading photographers, writers, filmmakers, designers and programmers to merge creative storytelling with state-of-the-art technology...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhotographer
Date of Birth5 November 1949
CountryUnited States of America
I was painfully shy when I was a kid. I always thought when most people were born, part of the toolkit was teaching you how to relate to other people - and it was just left out of my toolkit.
The 'America at Home' project was aimed at being the most extensive record of American home life ever attempted, and we were amazed at how many people were willing to participate as photographers or to welcome the photographers into their homes.
Some people think that Facebook is fantastic; other people are very worried about it.
I think people love this idea of leaving a message for the future. I was always fascinated by the idea of time capsules.
A lot of people don't want to know, but I'd like to know if I have a 10 percent or a 90 percent chance of developing Alzheimer's some day. If I know I'm likely to develop it, I'm certainly going to start looking around right now to find if there is something that I can do to offset it.
The people who are thinking most about big data right now are corporations and governments.
How do you photograph a gadget in a new, and not boring, way? You have to get away from people sitting in front of a computer. You have to get a look at the digital signature.
If you travel 11 months a year - from one dangerous or isolated situation to the next - if you live in hotels, and every relationship with another human being is a two-week relationship, the only other people who have any idea what you're going through or how strung out you are are other photographers.
The hard thing about the book world is that you never know whether 10 people or a million people will find it interesting.
The world that our children living in is going to be completely different because of big data.
Programmers have been wandering out and shooting a shotgun into the night sky and hoping they hit something, and I end up paying $150 for channels full of nothing I want to watch.
My company, Against All Odds Productions, has done print on demand; we were the first to do a book with a CD-ROM in the early 1990s. We do custom covers. It's always fun to do something new.
The ability to collect, analyze, triangulate and visualize vast amounts of data in real time is something the human race has never had before. This new set of tools, often referred by the lofty term 'Big Data,' has begun to emerge as a new approach to addressing some of the biggest challenges facing our planet.
Photographers have always been each other's biggest fans.