Stumbled across a post titled He Took a Polaroid Every Day, Until the Day He Died on the mental_floss blog yesterday, and thought it was simply amazing! I’ve seen people drop out of the 365 Project left, right and center – heck, I consider it occasionally…
Yesterday I came across a slightly mysterious website — a collection of Polaroids, one per day, from March 31, 1979 through October 25, 1997. There’s no author listed, no contact info, and no other indication as to where these came from. So, naturally, I started looking through the photos. I was stunned by what I found.

That’s an incredible 6,697 Polaroids, dated in sequence for 18 years! Chris Higgens over at the mental_floss blog did some research and found out:
Finally my investigation turned up the photographer as Jamie Livingston, and he did indeed take a photo every day for eighteen years, until the day he died, using a Polaroid SX-70 camera. He called the project “Photo of the Day†and presumably planned to collect them at some point — had he lived. He died on October 25, 1997 — his 41st birthday.
Two of Livingston’s friends got a hold of his Polaroid collection and set up an exhibit and website.
After Livingston’s death, his friends Hugh Crawford and Betsy Reid put together a public exhibit and website using the photos and called it JAMIE LIVINGSTON. PHOTO OF THE DAY: 1979-1997, 6,697 Polaroids, dated in sequence. The physical exhibit opened in 2007 at the Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard College (where Livingston started the series, as a student, way back when). The exhibit included rephotographs of every Polaroid and took up a 7 x 120 foot space.
More detailed information can be read over at Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn’s Jamie Livingston section. Some cool stuff there… the official site is down, apparently:
The Photo of That Day project is a work in progress, and the site was put up partly to help coordinate the effort to put together the show at Bard College. That’s why there is so little information on the site. The photos of the post-its with dates are placeholders for photos that were lost.
I’ll keep an eye on it, they’re hoping to have the site back up today at some point…