NEW YORK NEW YORK – I’m lurking through life with my shirt-pocket-sized camera. Here’s an ATM that includes another self-portrait. The distortion foreshadows some of the composites that I’ll be posting later this week from my 1999 24 hour series of self-portraits.
Interestingly (perhaps predictably) I’m falling into a familiar pattern of daily photo projects. If you Google “one photo a day” or a similar combination of words you’ll find sites with titles like “Ben takes a picture of himself every day” or “Noah takes a picture of himself every day for six years”. Who gives a damn? Why would you bother to click through one of these links, edging yourself one click closer to carpal tunnel syndrome? “Ben takes a picture of himself . . ” is like a 20-year old’s memoir. Not enough milage to be interesting.
The picture-a-day space has become a rundown neighborhood. It seems to be populated with losers who don’t have anything else to do with their time than take pictures of themselves. There are now sites that make it easy to post a picture a day. Try flickaday for example. (Sponsoring my own website for this purpose is distinctly not easy.) There are more of them, a lot more of them, than when I started this project two years ago. There’s a photo-a-day bubble in this country. Notify the Federal Reserve – picture of myself every day sites may be Systemically Important. If photography were housing these sites would be double-wide trailer parks.
Anyway, here’s the ATM taken with my Ricoh GRD IV.
Free at last – this is the last picture in the series of 24 self-portraits taken hourly over 24 hours on February 13 and 14, 1999. It’s taken, well 24 days, to get this off of my chest. The camera was an Arca-Swiss 8×10. In this and a few other images in the series I look slightly cross-eyed. It may be the camera angle which was a bit to close for portraiture.
