The images are ordinary to begin with, dinner with friends, card games, trips to watch baseball. Some are candid, some abstract, some incomprehensible.
As the years go by, the images begin to tell a story. This is a photographer, he works in the film industry... later he is photographed with various musical instruments.
The images speak of a happy life - dinners with friends, holidays, lying in the park on a sunny day. Ordinary things. Then in May 1996, one photo tells more than a thousands words:
And within six months, he has died.
The original site contains no information about the identity of the photographer, or indeed why he decided to chronicle his life in this way.
Another site explains that he is called Jamie Livingstone.
After he died, his friends Hugh Crawford and Betsy Reid put the polaroids together and exhibited them in an exhibition called 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).
I can't find any information on whether there are plans for the exhibition to travel. The website has every image, (almost 7000 of them) and they make gripping, if poignant, viewing. They reminded me of the energy of the human life, and the fleeting nature of our earthly lives. If I'm having a bad day, I'm going to try to remember this guy and how quickly our lives can turn around. I complain about the tube being crowded, my coffee being too cold, the alarm waking me before I'm ready, but today I hope to thank God that I'm alive, that I can drink coffee in a cafe reading the newspaper and that my ears could hear the alarm sound this morning.
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