A STILL MOMENT FROM EVERY DAY: A JAMIE REMEMBRANCE

Risa Mickenberg, a friend of Jamie Livingston's, wrote this soon after Jamie's death in 1997. Risa is a writer and is in the band, Risa Mickenberg, Jesus H Christ & The 4 Hornsmen of the Apocalypse, who will be appearing on PBS on Halloween. Check out their MY SPACE page (link above) for more information.

A Still Moment From Every Day

It's strange for someone to leave behind a record of every day of their life. Or to obsessively follow a project whose only perfect completion ends with their death.

Our work is always ahead of us. It starts when we are born and it ends when we die - this work of seeing, touching and affecting the world.

Jamie spread this collection out every year and examined it - reviewed it.

Our lives are a flood of images and we are collectors who keep a strange assortment of images: moments of extreme emotion, pain, beauty, and fear stand out. Events we're taught to remember: weddings, graduations, births, deaths.

Then there are the millions of images that we can't shake out of our heads, that come to us at strange times - things we can't remember why we remember: the gold threads in an old stereo speaker, the way the light hit a thousand cars in a parking lot by the water, the face of a stranger in a restaurant, a friend standing in a pool - you can't remember where, slapping the water with the flat of her hand.

Memory is a sieve that holds curious things. A life is a trail of strange, colorful memories.

Jamie's Photo-of-the-Day works like a life. A still moment from every day for years. Remains of the day, immortalized. It is a selection: what we choose to remember, what we add to our collection of days.

There was no set time of day.  It was when the mood struck: this is what I will take.

It's an accumulation, a collection, a life's work.