In this age of Flickr and digital cameras the picture-a-day project has become an ubiquitous feature of photo-sharing sites, and I fully confess I went through a phase myself with results so wildly varying I gave it up after a few months. But back in 1979 a young art student named Jamie Livingston quite by accident realized he'd taken a Polaroid every day for a month and decided to keep doing it. For almost 20 years, until his death of a brain tumor on his 41st birthday, Livingston faithfully documented his friends, his surroundings, himself. His longtime friend Hugh Crawford hosts a Web site that collects every single one of the Polaroids in one place, and he talked to Johnny Dee about Livingston's creative process:
There are a lot of visual jokes, fuzzy shots and fluffed
self-portraits, but the plan was to take one picture and keep it no
matter how it turned out. Once they found themselves walking with
circus elephants through the heart of New York, late at night. Crawford
turned to his friend and suggested this could be the picture of the
day. "He was like, 'No, I took a picture of my lunch, it's already been
taken,'" laughs Crawford.
The pictures themselves are heartbreakingly beautiful, and they make me sad that not only is Livingston no longer with us but that the Polaroid format itself is now officially obsolete. Instant pixels just aren't the same.