flickering pictures

I see a lot of neat stuff on the Web, but this really hit me.

The brilliant gang at Mental Floss somehow discovered an anonymous beta site featuring 6,000 scanned polaroids — one taken each day from March 31, 1979 to October 25, 1997. Some impressive detective work by the Mental Floss crew turned up the name of the photographer — Jamie Livingston — and the shots chronicle what looks like an amazing life — and death — full of good music, good friends and powerful emotion. Absolutely, positively worth a look — at least at the write-up (with selected shots), since the actual photo site is down (as of 12:15 EST) because of all the unexpected traffic. [Edit: the site is now up.] Just, beautiful.

From Mental Floss:

What started for me as an amusing collection of photos — who takes photos every day for eighteen years? — ended with a shock. Who was this man? How did his photos end up on the web? I went on a two-day hunt, examined the source code of the website, and tried various Google tricks.

Finally my investigation turned up the photographer as Jamie Livingston, and he did indeed take a photo every day for eighteen years, until the day he died, using a Polaroid SX-70 camera. He called the project “Photo of the Day” and presumably planned to collect them at some point — had he lived. He died on October 25, 1997 — his 41st birthday.

After Livingston’s death, his friends Hugh Crawford and Betsy Reid put together a public exhibit and website using the photos and called it JAMIE LIVINGSTON. PHOTO OF THE DAY: 1979-1997, 6,697 Polaroids, dated in sequence. The physical exhibit opened in 2007 at the Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard College (where Livingston started the series, as a student, way back when). The exhibit included rephotographs of every Polaroid and took up a 7 x 120 foot space.

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