Photo each day... for 13 years

No... as much as I like to take photos, this one's not about me, but about Jeff Harris's project (starting in 1999) to take a photo of himself each day.


Jeff Harris: 4,748 Self-Portraits and Counting from We Know Music on Vimeo.

From Time:

In an effort to record the year of his life leading up to the millennium, Jeff Harris began a project in which he used his trusty Olympic Stylus 35mm film camera (he’s since gone through six) to take a self-portrait each day and then posted the results on his website. The project, which began long before the widespread popularity of blogging, Facebook and Flickr, allowed viewers to follow one photographer along on his adventures. “I didn’t want 365 images of me sitting on the couch each day,” says Harris. “There could have been that tendency, especially during the cold dark winter months to stay inside all the time, but this project inspired me to get out there and seek out interesting things.” This year, Harris embarks on year fourteen of what has turned out to be an epic, inspired and ever-evolving art project that documents a life well lived.

The images range from completely solitary, auto-timed self-portraits to photographs inspired by a collaborative spirit with whomever Harris encounters on a given day. Regardless of the mood, location or activity at the center of any given image in the series, they all show a marvelously open and generous approach to both diaristically recording and sharing everything from intimate moments to athletic adventures with a wider audience. In fact, Harris evokes the full range of physical experiences a body can encounter: from mundane inactivity to joyful dives to his body being open on the operating table.

Jeff's project has been discussed in Autofocus.

All I can say is, really quite cool... And I thought that my little project of taking a photo of the same view out of the front of the cabin was a bit of heavy going. Having to take a new photo of yourself each day? That's awesome!