Jamie Livingston Polaroid-A-Day on Very Short List

Lots of traffic expected. Here's the story on Very Short List. The Jamie Livingston site seems to be holding up well thanks to Hugh and friends in Minneapolis.

When that itch surfaces to revisit all the big moments in our lives (the proms, weddings, births, European vacations), we naturally reach for the photo album. But where are all those other days — that Tuesday in March, say, when, as far as we can recall, nothing happened? The New York–based cinematographer Jamie Livingston found something worth photographing that day, and the next, as he meticulously (and miraculously) chronicled twenty years of his life in Polaroids before succumbing to cancer in 1997, on his 41st birthday.

Photo of the Day is the beautifully sad website erected by Livingston’s friends to catalogue his prodigious output, with 6,697 captured moments ranging from the mundane to the sublime. There he is napping in one, and newly engaged in another. His lovely gesture of toting around a camera to immortalize the everyday, every day, feels oddly prescient. After all, that cell-phone camera you carry everywhere? Maybe use it or lose it, forever.