The Man Who Made Japan Say ‘Cheese’ : Smolan’s Shots Seen ‘Round the World

Growing up in Cedar Grove, N. J., Rick Smolan was, by his own description, “the classic underachiever, D-minus average, totally shy. I’d sit in class and daydream about being Superman.” Then he discovered photography and “with a camera in my hands I all of a sudden felt like Superman.”

The same Rick Smolan, who at 35, graces the pages of the current Esquire magazine as one of 116 “Men and Women Under 40 Who Are Changing the Nation”?

Smolan winced just a bit at the accolade. “The only word I can really live with,” he said, “is catalyst. I’m a bit unfocused.”

Latest Coup

Perhaps, but consider the latest coup by Rick Smolan, Superman: Masterminding a $3.5-million project that brought 100 of the world’s outstanding photojournalists to Japan on June 7 of last year to photograph that enigmatic country, her Kentucky Colonels and her kabukis, for “A Day in the Life of Japan,” the stunning book that rolled off color presses in Tokyo only six months after Smolan and partner David Cohen said yes to what they sensed was a crazy proposal.

And they did it their way--that is to say, without investing either their money or that of Collins Publishers. The project was totally underwritten, either with cash or in-kind services, by American Express International, Kodak, Japan Air Lines, Tokyo Hilton International, Apple Computer and Olympus Cameras, all of which agreed to Smolan and Cohen’s terms: No sponsor would have any editorial control or right of censorship.

‘Warts and All’

Smolan, who first tested his format in 1981 with the self-published “A Day in the Life of Australia” and subsequently gathered his photographic elite together for 24 hours in Hawaii and in Canada (the only effort he views in retrospect as “boring”) is adamant that the books show a country “warts and all. We’re not doing a public relations effort for the country” and, he emphasized, these are not just pretty travel books.

Sending the photographers forth in the land of Mt. Fuji, geishas and kimonos, Smolan suggested that he would be pleased not to have them return with pictures of any of these, which he viewed as cliches. So what happened? Jodi Cobb of National Geographic came back with a geisha picture so compelling it wound up as the book’s cover. And Smolan himself contributed a shot of Mt. Fuji, taken from a helicopter.

Smolan can live with those choices, made by a team of picture editors who sifted through 135,000 slides to select the fewer than 300 that could be included in the book. The geisha, he said, was so extraordinary that it was the unanimous cover choice. And Mt. Fuji? He reasoned that “it’s a little unfair to do a book about Japan and leave that out. In Australia, I left out koala bears because most people have no contact with them. But many Japanese climb Mt. Fuji before they die.”

But lest there be a thought that “A Day in the Life of Japan” is merely a 240-page, $40 picture post card, the editors’ choices include too a graveyard in a coal town where 62 miners died this year in an explosion, a pair of topless female sumo wrestlers in a beer garden, a bag lady sleeping outside a fashionable Tokyo shop and the distorted bodies of victims of mercury poisoning from industrial dumping in the Bay of Minamata.

If “A Day in the Life of . . . “ is a brilliant concept it is not, budding entrepreneur Rick Smolan acknowledges, an entirely original one. He and Cohen merely refined it.

Smolan, an ingratiating young man who, with his long hair, drooping mustache and steel-rimmed glasses has been described as a “sunny Manchu,” was recalling over dinner on a recent rainy Los Angeles night walking into Time-Life offices one day a decade ago in hopes of being hired for Life’s planned “A Day in the Life of America” photo essay.

He was then just out of college (Dickinson in Carlisle, Pa.) and, “afraid to leave the nest,” was hanging around Carlisle, taking the college yearbook pictures, the football team, shots for the hometown newspaper.

“I loved the idea of the one-day thing,” he said, so he summoned his courage and, “shaking,” approached Life bearing his portfolio. To that time, his free-lance credits included such spectaculars as two Philadelphia policemen beside a flying saucer--an assignment from the National Enquirer. “It was so obvious that the two of them had sat around on the beat and made this mockup,” he said. And that’s what he told the Enquirer, by which he was subsequently let go. “I wasn’t respectful enough toward all those weirdos,” he concluded.

A Desperate Man

What he was told by the receptionist at Life was, essentially, “The elevator’s over there.” But, walking toward that elevator, the man who dreamed of being Superman remembered “whenever I saw this scene in a movie the hero always did something .” Smolan, reasoning that the receptionist was bored with her job, decided to show her his pictures. Just then a staff photographer wandered by and, impressed, summoned his picture editor.

Very nice, concluded the picture editor, but Life wanted 99 photographers for the project and they had already hired 99. Smolan was desperate: “Ever since I was 16 I’ve wanted to be a photographer for Time-Life.” The picture editor, John Loengard, now picture editor of Life, relented, saying, “I guess it isn’t going to bankrupt Time-Life if we make that an even 100.”

Smolan wound up with two small pictures in the issue and $150 for his day’s work. And, as an experience, it was mixed. The idea was better than the execution, the issue sold poorly and, Smolan said, he sensed what was lacking was any feeling of being part of something big. “Everyone just sent in their film,” he said. “I wanted desperately to be part of a team. You knew nothing at all about these human beings who were seeing America (through their lenses).”

However, for Smolan it was an entree and soon he was in Tokyo, on assignment from Time. A year in the Orient was followed by two in Australia. “I shot my first cover (for Time) when I was 25,” he said. “I thought I was going to be 50 before I got my second.” But soon there were seven more Time covers (for the regional edition) and a spread in National Geographic.

On a Solo Trek

The latter resulted from a meeting in Australia with Robin Davidson, a young woman who was trekking alone across the desert of Western Australia with four camels. “I fell in love with her and I fell in love with Australia,” he said. “We spent a year in the desert together.”

The relationship with Davidson, who is still a friend, was to affect him profoundly. It was Davidson’s opinion, he said, that “photographers are parasites, mercenaries, who feed off other people’s opinions and contribute nothing. She kept saying, ‘Now, if you’re a real photogapher you’ll find something you care about . . . ‘ “

Smolan did, while photographing Amerasian children in Korea on assignment for Geo magazine. The beautiful blue-eyed, freckle-faced children, offspring of Korean mothers and American servicemen, broke his heart. “No matter how beautiful we thought they were,” he learned, “in the eyes of the Koreans they were all genetic freaks. Nobody will marry these kids, or educate them, or hire them.”

Eleven-year-old Eunsooklee, abandoned by her mother and being reared by her grandmother, haunted him. The grandmother asked if Smolan would adopt the child, but he was single and living a nomadic life style and it was impossible. Then, on Christmas day of 1977 while he was having dinner in Bangkok a telegram arrived with the message that someone in Korea had died and left him an 11-year-old girl in her will.

When Smolan reached Korea he found Eunsooklee living with an aunt and uncle, for whom she was keeping house. She opened the door to him, he recalled, and “her eyes were totally dead.” He realized quickly that the aunt and uncle were not going to relinquish her willingly--”They had a servant for life. I was sick to my stomach.”

Homecoming Queen

Smolan went to work. He wrote to friends in Atlanta who had an 11-year-old boy; they agreed to adopt the girl. In time Smolan persuaded the aunt and uncle, and Eunsooklee’s future father and stepbrother flew to Korea to take her home to Atlanta.

Eunsooklee (now Natasha Driskell) is 18 now, a freshman at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. With great pride, Smolan noted, “She won homecoming queen last year at her high school.” (She also went to Hawaii with the “Day in the Life” crew as a photographer’s assistant).

The Geo assignment in Korea did not go well for Smolan. In his view, the editors, wary of controversy, “cut every one of the pictures that would move you or shake you. I was really upset.” At the same time Smolan was wearying of the life of a free-lance photographer--”Some of the glitter was wearing off. I was getting tired of hotel rooms and being by myself.”

He wanted camaraderie, and he wanted to boost the art of photojournalism. His thoughts returned to Australia. Why not bring other photographers there and scatter them across the country and have them shoot during the same 24-hour period? . . .

Smolan was convinced that every publisher in Australia “would fall in love with the idea. Every single one said no. They didn’t think Australia was that interesting. They didn’t think all those photographers would come.” And they didn’t think there was a market in the United States for a $40 picture book on Australia.

The photographers did come, working without pay and without so much as a guarantee that their photographs would be in the book (an understanding still in force). The book, self-published, was financed by Smolan, his family and friends and a sponsor to whom Smolan promised 15,000 copies at a cost to Smolan of $10 each. “We had the resources for a dune buggy,” he said, “and we were trying to build a Mercedes-Benz,” a top-notch, large-format hardcover book. “Every stupid mistake a beginner could make, we made.”

“A Day in the Life of Australia,” published in 1981, went into a second printing and has sold 180,000 copies. Eventually, Smolan said, he and Cohen “just about split even.”

Smolan knew one thing: “I never wanted to hear about a day in the life of anything again.”

Then, in July of 1983, a period when, he recalled, “we were really depressed, like really suicidal,” Smolan was teaching a photography workshop at Lake Tahoe when Gov. George Ariyoshi of Hawaii called. He had seen the book in a hotel room in Australia and he wanted one like it in celebration of the 25th anniversary of statehood.

All Smolan could say was, “You don’t want to get involved, believe me.” As a lure, Ariyoshi held out a suite for a week in Waikiki. Smolan and Cohen bit. They reminded the governor, however, “We’re not tourist promoters.” His response: “We don’t have much to hide.”

The book, published by Workman and underwritten by six large Hawaiian companies, sold 10,000 copies the first day and sales have now reached 80,000--or 20% of Hawaiian households. “The Hawaiians just went nuts,” Smolan said. The 50 photographers on the project were paid $750 each, plus free surfing lessons, and Smolan and Cohen finally made money.

Encouraged, if not giddy with success, they were ready to listen when Nicholas Harris of Collins Publishers in Canada showed up at their suite in Hawaii, proposing to put up $1 million to print 100,000 copies of “whatever you give me to print” on Canada. Smolan recalled, “I had severe reservations about doing a book about Canada and, basically, they were not wrong.”

Potential Sponsors

In Canada, Smolan and Cohen went calling on potential corporate sponsors and “every door was slammed in our face.” Eventually they got $75,000 from an oil company, Canon cameras gave $30,000 and, Smolan said, “I got down on my hands and knees” at Canadian Pacific Airlines and came away with $80,000 in air tickets for the photographers. Smolan then went back to Collins and “got all the money the book would ever earn” in advance. It has sold 130,000 copies to date and, Smolan said, “We’re still $37,000 in debt to the publishers.”

Meanwhile, Smolan said, “Everyone was saying, ‘You guys must be getting really rich.’ ”

Smolan and Cohen decided they would choose the next locale. They called the director of information at the Soviet embassy in Washington and proposed “A Day in the Life” of the Soviet Union. He seemed interested, Smolan said, but “then (Konstantin) Chernenko died and we never heard another word.”

All around them, Smolan said, “People were saying, ‘Do Texas.’ But it seemed to me if it was that obvious that’s not where we should be.” Instead, they approached the Irish Tourist Board. What they said, basically, Smolan recalled, was “If you mention Northern Ireland we’re not interested.”

Next came a call to Smolan and Cohen from the Mexican government, which flew them down for a conference. Smolan reminded them, “We’re going to show that Mexico has some serious problems” as well as incredible beauty. “They never returned our calls” after that, he said.

Finally, in the spring, a call came from Jim Boff at American Express in Tokyo, where his company had just funded an exhibit of “A Day in the Life of Canada” photographs. American Express was interested in funding a Japan book--could they get the book out by Christmas?

It was a gamble, their first venture in a non-Western country where they would be dealing with both a language barrier and a people rooted in ancient tradition even as they eat at McDonald’s and criss-cross the country by bullet train. Was it presumptuous of Smolan and Cohen to bring in 75 foreign photographers (joined by 25 Japanese photographers) to try to capture the essence of Japan in a single 24-hour period?

Smolan warned the photographers, “With one book of 240 pages, it is possible to offend every citizen of this country.”

On March 1 he sent a “Dear Photographer” letter to photojournalists scattered throughout the world; several dozen had worked on the three earlier books. Others were not available and, Smolan said, “Some people we don’t invite back. We now have people incredibly famous asking us if they can work on the next book.”

Arriving in Japan May 31, the photographers were assigned roommates (a ploy Smolan has found both cuts costs and stirs up creative competition) and were handed kits with guidebooks, model releases, film and two Kodak Instamatics to be given to schoolchildren who would also be snapping pictures on June 7. (A sampling is in the book.)

Smolan is determined to “get everybody excited about photography.”

Smolan and his staff of 15 had spent three months scouting possible locations; each photographer was given an assignment but also encouraged to keep an eye out for the unexpected. What he wanted, Smolan reminded them, was “extraordinary pictures of ordinary events.

With 120 million people, Japan is beset by overcrowding, pollution and inflation. But it is still a country where the must mundane activity is approached as a ceremony. Smolan wanted to capture these contradictions.

The photographers came back with images of a Japanese family at Disneyland posing in costume, complete with poke bonnets and 10-gallon hat, as Wild West pioneers; the meeting of a quality control circle at a Nissan plant, a morning exercise class at a hospital for survivors of the Hiroshima bombing. Translators from International Christian University, assigned the project as classwork, paved the way.

There were a few disappointments. At Disneyland, Mickey Mouse refused to be photographed, sans his head, eating his lunch with chopsticks. And the Iranian photographer assigned to photograph the Japanese Mafia was turned away. A slight misunderstanding resulted in the photographer assigned to the squid fishing fleet being provided with a glowing squid instead of a brightly lighted boat. French photographer Jean-Pierre Laffont, who was supposed to photograph the subways, broke his leg a few days earlier. Improvising, he suggested he be stationed, in his wheelchair, in a hospital, where he shot memorable photographs of death and birth.

While the photographers were shooting the Japanese, the Japanese were shooting them. NHK, the Japanese counterpart of the BBC, aired a 60-minute documentary in July. Smolan has the rights to the NHK film, which will be turned into a PBS documentary to be seen in about six months.

The photographers’ slides, 135,000 of them, were winnowed by the picture editors, with Smolan and Cohen having the final say--”It’s sort of like a Communist election,” he noted. Then Smolan’s sister, Leslie Smolan, a New York-based designer currently doing some graphics for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, laid out the book.

For their day’s work, each photographer received $1,000 and an Apple computer and, Smolan said, “We paid ourselves really well this time.” For some, the book is a showcase. As Smolan said, on these projects “the guy in the shadows photographing Ronald Reagan is a star.”

If 20% of Japanese households were to buy the book, Smolan knows, sales will be staggering. The Japanese text version will be out in January. Major revisions had to be made, he noted--”The Japanese did not need to be told, for example, that Japanese use chopsticks.”

Rick Smolan makes it clear that he does not intend to make a life’s work of “A Day in the Life of . . . “ He and Cohen have promised Collins one more book. Recently, he has had calls from the tourist offices of both Spain and Bermuda. Brazil interests him--”The contrast, people living in the jungles, life in Rio at Mardi Gras.” But, he wonders, is there a large enough middle class to buy the book?

“One idea we came up with,” he said, “is to do 50 books, one in each state.” More probable is “A Day in the Life of the United States.” Smolan talks of 4,000 photographers fanning across the land. He fantasizes about President Reagan “going on TV and asking everyone in America to get out their cameras that day and put a roll of film in” and photograph for posterity their families and “all the boring things you do every day.”

And, after America?

Well, said Rick Smolan, the little kid once so shy he hid behind his camera, “I’d love to go to another planet . . . .”