PHOTO DIARY PROJECT
Introduction
For the past five years, I have become very interested in the notion, practice and reality of keeping an annual ”photo diary,” interested enough to keep one myself and begin a study of the phenomena. I was initially prompted by the extraordinary work of the UK-based visual sociologist, Elizabeth Chaplin (see: http://www.wimbledonpark.blogspot.com), keeper of a 20-year photo diary. Then I became curious about what other photo diarists had accomplished or were currently doing. A Google Search was helpful located the following: the work of DIVANOVA (see: http://divanova07.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html, continued at http://www.divanova08.blogspot.com/), David Adam Edelstein (see: http://www.davidadam.com/visualdiary/), Chris Johansen (see: http://chrisjohanesen.com/weblog/2007/01/07/the-year-in-camera-phone-photos/), New Zealand-based Lisa Sarsfield (see: http://photo-a-day-project.blogspot.com/ and http://photo-a-day-project.blogspot.com/2008/03/lomo-style-photography.html), Debi Cates (see: http://debicates.blogspot.com/), and most recently, Nic Wood in Australia (see: http://nicolewood.blogspot.com/), just to mention a few. One has to be impressed with the international distribution of these efforts.
Intention
I want to use this blog to put up the day-by-day results of a photo diary I kept between January 1 and December 31, 2006. My current motive is to understand better what I was doing – I want to know more about the kinds of explicit and implicit rules that either stimulated or controlled my photography. This included trying to figure out the boundaries of what I implicitly felt was permissible, expected, desirable or off-bounds. Somehow I had to decide what could be or could not be included for any kind of public inspection. Sounds kinda simple, but… So let’s see what there is to see.