This morning while I was going through my feed reader and scanning things on tumblr I came across a post from Justin Day’s Tumblr that led me to this post. It is worth the read believe me.
Yesterday I came across a slightly mysterious website — a collection of Polaroids, one per day, from March 31, 1979 through October 25, 1997. There’s no author listed, no contact info, and no other indication as to where these came from. So, naturally, I started looking through the photos. I was stunned by what I found.
I read through this story about a man who took a photo every day until the day he died. This one is from April 23, 1979.
Who was this man? And who decides to take a photo everyday for 18 years?
As a senior at Bard College in 1979, Jamie Livingston acquired a Polaroid camera. After a few weeks, he noticed that he was taking about one picture a day, and shortly thereafter he decided to continue doing so.
The project, which quickly evolved into something of an obsession, began with a snapshot of Mindy Goldstein, Mr. Livingston’s girlfriend at the time, along with another friend, both of them smiling at something outside the frame. It ended 18 years and more than 6,000 photos later with a self-portrait of the photographer on his deathbed on his 41st birthday.
The narrative that unfolds between those two images tells the story not only of the friendships Mr. Livingston forged over the years but also the evolution of a city. It charts New York’s progression from an era of urban decay and fiscal crisis to a place characterized by the economic recovery that had arrived by the time of Mr. Livingston’s death, of melanoma, in 1997. This was especially true downtown, where he lived for much of the period covered in the photographs.
Before Mr. Livingston died, his friends Hugh Crawford and Betsy Reid promised they would not let the project die with him. To commemorate the 10th anniversary of their friend’s death, they digitally photographed the Polaroids and reproduced them for an exhibition at Bard, in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.
Mr. Crawford also loaded the images onto a Web site (photooftheday.hughcrawford.com) so they could be experienced in their entirety.
As the cityscape has changed, many of the pictures have accrued meaning. “They often don’t mean anything by themselves,” Mr. Crawford said. “But when you put them all together, they take on a life of their own.”
Ms. Reid, who met Mr. Livingston in 1985, cited other benefits of the collection. “When I look at a picture that I was involved in or know about,” she said, “you’re just sent right back in time and you just remember everything about that day.”
It is a truly touching story. It got me thinking about what stories like this mean for my generation. The digital age. I myself have quite the collection of Polaroids. I collect vintage Polaroid cameras, something I started back in high school. I even decided that I wanted to remember my 21st birthday only in Polaroids. However I also have a few good digital cameras. I was a photography major and photography is certainly my first love.
There have been many daily photo projects across the web. Photojojo has one called Project 365 and many people have started to take a photo a day and put it on the web. There are flickr groups and other sites just dedicated to this.
But what if you decide to do this, take a photo a day, or any amount of photos for that matter, and put them on the web. What happens if flickr gets taken down, or changed their terms of service, where do the photos go?
I attended a panel discussion this past March at SXSW about where our content goes when we die. It was not a very good panel, mainly because they were really just trying to pitch a service they were creating, but it got me thinking. What will this generation leave behind?
Many of us know that we should always back up our content. Photos, videos, etc. But these days many people are creating content that goes straight to the web. It didn’t originate on your computer. Sites let you take a picture with your webcam straight to the site. I record videos straight onto viddler sometimes. Now of course many of these services will let you download the source files, but who really takes the time to do all of that?
It will be very interesting to see the types of digital artifacts that this group of web savvy people leave behind.
