A One Week Time Capsule of Life in America
A NATION TELLS ITS STORY THROUGH A DIGITAL LENS

From creators of The New York Times #1 Best-Seller, A Day In The Life of America, comes the best-selling book and multimedia lecture AMERICA 24/7 — a visual journey across all 50 states.

During the week of May 12-18, 2003, America 24/7 invited everyone in America with a digital camera to submit photographs that depict their lives, families, and community—and what it means to be American. In one week, Pulitzer prize-winning, professional, student, and amateur photographers across the nation shot more than one million pictures. This extraordinary collaboration produced an honest, upbeat look at America—a visual time capsule produced by citizens from every walk of life.

The images in America 24/7 offer a fascinating insight into American life, our diversity and culture, at a crucial point in the nation's history. "Hard at Work" runs the gamut from a worker changing a light bulb atop a silvered gargoyle on New York's Chrysler Building to a 77-year-old 'dress-fluffer' at Disney’s Fairy Tale Fantasy wedding venue in Orlando, Florida. Images of "America at Play" range from Inuit children playing stickball in western Alaska to grandmothers out for a strenuous morning row in Oakland, California. "Our Town" includes pictures of a seeing-eye Shetland pony and a three-year-old girl in a sheep-riding contest. "Reason to Believe" captures the broad range of American belief contrasting, for example, the Willow Creek mega-church, which serves 17,500 Illinois Christians each weekend, with a fiery right of passage for an 11-year-old Apache girl. "Sea to Shining Sea" contrasts man and nature, setting tornadoes ripping through Texas against a Virginia garbage dump and the painted mesas of Arizona.

THE MULTIMEDIA PROGRAM

A celebrated photojournalism professional, one of the key figures in creating America 24/7 (listed below), shares the captivating images that make up this snapshot of American life. The multimedia presentation takes audiences into the stories behind the pictures and behind the scenes of the largest photographic publishing event in U.S. history. In September 2004, 52 subsequent 24/7 books will be published—one for each state, Washington, D.C and New York City. Thereafter, each lecture will also incorporate images from your state.

THE SPEAKERS

Rick Smolan is a former Time, Life and National Geographic photographer, and is one of the co-founders of the best-selling A Day in the Life series. He is the co-founder of Against All Odds Productions, a multi-media publisher specializing in large-scale photographic projects that combine compelling storytelling with state-of-the-art technology.

David Elliot Cohen is a Yale graduate, best-selling author and editor, and is best known as one of the creators of the A Day in the Life series. He has won numerous awards including the Innovation in Photography Award from the American Society of Media Photographers and several National Press Association and World Press Photo Awards.

Karen Mullarkey, Photography Director
Karen Mullarkey began her career in photography when she was working at Life Magazine in the mid-sixties. Here under the tutelage of the Director of Photography, she worked as the onsite producer for Life's coverage of Apollo Space Program. She has directed the photography departments at Rolling Stone Magazine, Sports Illustrated and Newsweek where she was the first woman to head the photography department at any of the major news magazines. Mullarkey has produced and directed a series of HDTV documentaries and in 1995 began working on the Internet when she was the director of assignments and photography for the groundbreaking project, 24 Hours in Cyperspace. In 1999, she became the Vice President of Creative/Editor in Chief of Zing.com, an online consumer photography site. She has recently served as a photographic consultant for Designer Roger Black; the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Ft. Worth, Texas and the National Constitution Center due to open in Philadelphia in 2003.

Jay Dickman, Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist
Jay Dickman has worked in the photojournalism field for over 30 years, covering events as diverse as the war in El Salvador to the Olympics, national political conventions to 6 Super Bowls, the 40th Anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima to photographing Shirley Maclaine. He spent three months living in a stone-age village in Papua New Guinea, spent a week under the Arctic ice in a nuclear attack sub and flew around the world for a corporate shoot for EDS Corporation. He has been published in, among others, National Geographic (more than twenty times), LIFE, Time, Fortune, Forbes, Sports Illustrated, GEO, Stern, etc. Corporate clients include EDS Corporation, Dresser Industries, Hewlett Packard, Quaker, CH2M Hill, The Polk Company and Sun Micro Systems. Currently, he is spokesman for Olympus, as an “Olympus Visionary”, and represents Lexar as a “Lexar Elite Photographer”. Jay Dickman has spoken at many schools (including RIT and the Brooks Institute of Photography) as well as local and national groups.