Thursday, May 22, 2008

A Photo a Day for 18 Years - Jamie Livingston

Starting in 1979, Jamie Livingston took one polaroid a day for 18 years, until the day he died. His friends spent years putting together a website where his photos can be seen.

Captivated, I started thinking about how Descartes became famous as a mathematician by imagining that a curve could be conceived as a series of infinitesimally small points, and therefore could be approximated at different levels of refinement as a finite series of discrete points, which could be plotted on a graph with two axes, x and y.

Considering Jamie's polaroid-a-day over 18 years, I thought to myself:
  • Here we have a life represented as a finite series of discrete points.
  • Here we have a life represented as a finite series of discrete points.
  • Here we have a life represented as a finite series of discrete points.
  • Here we have a life represented as a finite series of discrete points.
The life represented is gone; the representations remain in life through us, if we view them and talk about them.

Cavemen didn't have the capacity to make the photos. They didn't have the capacity to make optically accurate visual representations, and I'm sure they didn't try to do that or even consider doing that.

All they had was the talk part to keep memory alive. What would they have talked about with regard to Jamie Livingston? Not a photo a day.

That makes me wonder what does it do to spread a life out in a photo a day? Where does it take one's mind and heart to spread a life out that way?

Maybe what we enjoy, in considering something like Jamie Livingston's 6,697 polaroid photos, is the tension we experience between the ingraspable living essence and the absolute regularity of a quasi-mathematicized temporal interval.


Jamie was a friend of my friend Ken Ross.

You can more about Jamie and the story of the website at mental floss and Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn