Rick Smolan (b. 1949) began his career as a photographer for Time, Life and National Geographic. In 1978 his photographs of Robyn Davidson on her trek with camels across Australia were published in National Geographic magazine. Davidson's book Tracks also included some of Smolan's work, and in 1992 he published From Alice to Ocean, a collection of photographs he took of the journey. For his popular 'Day in the Life' series of books, he asked 100 photographers to capture life in a specific place around the world in a single day, publishing only the best images. Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt founded Against All Odds Productions, which fosters large-scale global photographic projects that combine story-telling with technology and include books, apps, television documentaries and interactive exhibits. Their projects include Passage to Vietnam (1994), 24 Hours in Cyberspace: Painting on the Walls of the Digital Cave (1996), America 24/7 (2003), Blue Planet Run: The Race to Provide Clean Drinking Water to the World (2007), America at Home (2008), UK at Home (2008), The Obama Time Capsule (2009), The Human Face of Big Data (2012) and The Good Fight: America's Ongoing Struggle for Justice (2017). In 2000 Smolan masterminded The Planet Project: Your Voice, Your World, one of the largest real-time internet polls in history, which resulted in answers from more than 1.5 million people in more than 240 countries about how they felt about their lives.
