A Polaroid Every Day for 41 Years

This is truly amazing. A man named Jamie Livingston (on the left in above picture) decided to take a Polaroid every day, and he did so until he died 41 years later. If you can't get through to the actual site the pictures and commentary over at Mental Floss will surely give you an idea of story of Jamie's life. There's something very haunting and inspiring at the same time to see something like this. Sort of like watching a life flash before your eyes, which it quite literally is.

Jamie Livingstons Life: 6,697 Polaroids

Here's what one of his friends who's hosting the site now says about Jamie's project:

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.