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Recently, I interviewed photographer Rick Smolan, who - along with his wife and creative partner, Jennifer Erwitt - put together the new photo book, “America at Home: A Close-Up Look at How We Live" from Running Press. These are the same folks who produced "A Day in the Life of America" and "America 24/7." Smolan is a former TIME, LIFE and National Geographic photographer and now runs Against All Odds Productions with Erwitt.
What was your goal with the book?
“I grew up with LIFE magazine which offered these wonderful glimpses into the lives of people that I’d never meet. I think we need to learn more about each other. I think it is important to see how many different ways people choose to live their lives. The book is like an ink blot test – it means different things to different people. We wanted to give people lots of different ways to experience it ... We also did a sister book ‘UK at Home’ – they said we needed to do it at the same time - whew! So, we had two teams. Google let us move into their offices in London and Paul McCartney wrote the introduction so it worked out pretty well."
Where did the concept come from?
"Well, I have an eight-year-old and a six-year-old. It's amazing how you come to see the world through their eyes. 'America at Home' came through my daughter, Phoebe. She was going on a sleepover and was nervous - what teddy bear should she take? What if she didn't like it? Would I come and get her? In the end, she had a great time. When I picked her up the next morning, I asked her, 'What was the one thing that stood oout the most?' She said, 'Dad, did you know you that other people’s lives are different than ours?' Then, my wife and were talking about it and looking at 'home' in terms of relationships.
Doing this book, it made me realize something: People hang out with people like themselves – there has to be a commonality. Yet, collectively I was stunned at the diversity and seeing how astounindingly different people’s homes are. I mean, so often the houses look the same on the outside but inside, it's a whole different story. Everyone takes the 'home' like a blank piece of paper and draws something unique."
Tell me about the custom cover feature.
"Pick a personal photo - it might be a digital photo or standard photograph - you can scan it, use a cropping tool or whatever. You can produce your own cover using your own photo. You also write the caption. It looks the same what you'd get in the bookstore except it's your personal photo on the cover. We’re the only people that have done this custom cover. People are the surprised, they really love this feature. We've seen some great covers come through."
Tell me about the logistics of this type of project.
"We spend about three months with researchers in New York, just planning. We'd put the word out via user groups and the Internet, looking for people with very interesting and diverse lifestyles who wanted to be a part of this project. We found people in magazines, on the web, talked to journalists and, of course, word of mouth.
Then, we sat down and put them all up on a board - we had a big map with dots on it - and discussed. ‘Ok, we've got too many people in NYC, we need more folks from the Midwest' and so on. Then, we called people up: ‘We have a photographer would like to spend a few days with your family.’ 99.9% people said yes."
The photographs depict people, for better or worse, going about their lives, as if the photographer is a fly on the wall. How did you manage to get people that comfortable?
"The thing is, people can put up a good face for about an hour and then they slide back into their routine. After awhile, people just got used to it and didn't even see the photographer anymore. Also, each photographer probably shot 1,000 photos a day so there's a wide range in there."
Did you provide the photographers with much
