A Polaroid a Day - for 6000 days.

10-31-79 © Jamie Livingston

I heard earlier in the month on CBC Radio's Spark (episode #50) about Jamie Livingston's Photo of the Day project, in which Livingston shot 6000 Polaroid images over 18 years, stopping only with his death in 1997.

His friend Hugh Crawford has digitized the images here with images month-by-month from 1979 to 1997 on the left side. And then here in the way they were displayed on the 10th anniversary of his death at the Bard College in NYC October of 2007. From the site: It is in four parts, showing each year horizontally with each day of the year vertically, and the photographs can be made larger. Zoomed in all the way the four parts would total about 16 feet by 250 feet. That it is really cool - and huge- way to display the images.

The following shows what some of five years of images looked like:

04-03-84 © Jamie Livingston

On Flickr there are various '365' groups such as this one, where you post an image a day - usually self portraits, for a year. And a lot of people find it hard to do that. I have never tried, though I tend to post only one image a day on there. But imagine shooting for 18 years straight?

Watching the last 18 years of Livingston's life is pretty interesting - and sad towards the end. It would take hours to do, but you can certainly check out the images in sections a few months at a time and then come back and check out more. An impressive project for anyone to undertake even with a digital camera, but with Polaroids? Staggering.

02-20-95 © Jamie Livingston

The Spark post is worth listening too and is available as an MP3 podcast here. It talks about the journey to find out what the story was behind the images as they were originally posted with no information, no bio and no backstory by Crawford.

Mike
Mike Wood Photography