Given one week to chronicle life in Colorado, local photographer Jay Dickman turned his lens on the Arkansas River and the hardy river rafters who earn their living thanks to nature's good graces.

"I just thought it was a relevant story because of the drought and with tourism being such a big factor in the economic well-being of Colorado," says Dickman, one of 25,000 shutterbugs who hit the streets last May to document American society for a new book, America 24/7.

Yet, Dickman, who also shot photos of Mesa Verde National Park, concedes that he took a risk by concentrating his photographs on such a remote part of the state.

"It was a stretch," says Dickman, a Pulitzer Prize winner and frequent National Geographic contributor. "It was the first week of the season, and they only had a few rafts going down. There wasn't an abundance of opportunities."

But Dickman did land a small photo in the book - a picture of a smiling woman in a raft, hands raised triumphantly in midrow, while a river rages in the background - one of 1,200 selected from a pool of 250,000.

"Mainly, we were looking for good pictures, but that's a little bit difficult to define," concedes Neil Ulevich, a Denver photographer and editor who helped narrow the field of submissions. "It should be a picture that expands your vision of America in some way."

Ulevich, Dickman and Mark Reis, deputy director of photography at the Colorado Springs Gazette, will appear at the Tattered Cover on Thursday to discuss their involvement in America 24/7, a nearly 300-page tome chock-full of both incredible and beautifully ordinary pictures of American life.

"I describe this book as visual comfort food," says David Eliot Cohen, an America 24/7 co-creator. "In a post-9-11 world, if you ask people what it means to be American, they're going to tell you about those things that make you feel warm and comfy."

Cohen and partner Rick Smolen, who had created the "Day in the Life" series of photography books two decades before, took an unusual approach with the book. In the past, they'd typically dispatched a corps of professionals to a site with specific assignments. This time around, they unleashed a legion of both amateurs and veterans and gave them free reign.

"Our instructions were open-ended and simple," Cohen explains. "We said, 'Show us your community, show us your home.' "

For some of the photographers, the book provided a chance to showcase classic American images: fathers and sons mowing lawns, a minor-league baseball player signing autographs, a kid buying treats at a candy store.

Others chose to highlight societal changes. There's a series of photos of blond suburbanites attending Botox parties, a picture centered on a circle of hands formed by a Boy Scout troop filled almost entirely with Vietnamese and Hispanic boys, and a touching shot of a lesbian couple with their adopted daughter.

"I was stunned by the incredible breadth of coverage, from Hasidic Jews to baseball to ballet - it just goes on and on," says Ulevich, also a Pulitzer Prize winner.

The project yielded so many photos that Cohen and Smolen plan to release individual books for each state and several cities next year.

And although the book paints a much rosier picture than Cohen expected, he says he's pleased with the final product: "It's not what I intended, but this is what I got, and 25,000 people can't be wrong."

'America 24/7' signing

• When and where: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Tattered Cover Book Store, 1628 16th St.

• Cost: free

• Information: 303-436-1070 or www.tatteredcover.com

gonzaleze@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5350