06-02-97


Fittingly, it was Noah Kalina who sent me the link to Chris Higgins at Mental Floss, who had uncovered what at first seemed to be a mystery; a website with a trove of images documenting a life, with no name attached:

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.

It turns out Higgins had somehow stumbled upon an unpublished website Livingston's friends Hugh Crawford and Betsy Reid had put together. The website came out the exhibit JAMIE LIVINGSTON. PHOTO OF THE DAY: 1979-1997, 6,697 Polaroids, dated in sequence, that 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 photographs of every Polaroid and took up a 7 x 120 foot space.





This story is pretty touching, and has been picked up on a lot of photo blogs, and elsewhere. Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn has full coverage of the story, the author having known Livingston personally:

This photographic diary, began when Jamie was a student at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson. The project continued when he moved to apartments in New York City including the incredible circus memorabilia-filled loft on Fulton Street, which he shared with his best friend.

The picture taking continued when he became a much-in-demand cinematographer and editor of music videos back in the early days of MTV. He contributed his talents to the ground-breaking Nike "Revolution" spot and many other commercials, too. 

When Jamie Livingston, photographer, filmmaker, circus performer, accordian player, Mets fan, and above all, loyal friend, died on October 25th (his birthday) in 1997 at the age of 41, he left behind hundreds of bereft friends and a collection of 6,000 photographs neatly organized in small suitcases and wooden fruit crates.

Apparently the story is even now on Wikipedia. Amazing how polaroids spread. Below, a selection.