zaterdag 31 augustus 2019

Exile on Main Street The Rolling Stones Layout Design John Van Hamersveld and Norman Sheef Concept and Photos Robert Frank Photography


The Rolling Stones - Exile on Main Street
This work is derived from the cover of the album Exile on Main Street by The Rolling Stones.
Original album covert art design credits: concept and photos by Robert Frank, layout design by John Van Hamersveld and Norman Sheef. Album produced by Jimmy Miller. Rolling Stones 1972.


(Frank’s orignal photo)

In 1972, Mick Jagger reached out to Frank and ask him to come to the Bel Air villa, the Los Angeles home where Mick and his band was staying while they finished their new album. Their new album was something unlike anything they’ve done yet, something raw and uniquely American. Jagger wanted its album cover to reflect the band as runaway outlaws using the blues as its weapon against the world. The album’s cover had to reflect this feeling of joyful isolation, grinning in the face of a scary and unknown future. It had to be perfect.

Frank was originally meant to shoot the band as they walked along the seedy Main St. of LA that they were supposedly exiled from, and those photos are all on the album’s back side where the band looks just as strange as the freaks from Frank’s photo. You can see more footage of those sessions here. However, his tattoo parlor photo caught the attention of John Van Hamersveld, who was hired by the Stones to put together the album package. Hamersveld had already worked with the Beatles and Hendrix and had already designed the classic poster for the 1966 surf documentary The Endless Summer, but Hamersveld knew right away that Frank’s photo, which he found among his many American outtakes, was destined to be used for this new album. Impressed with the photo, Hamersveld took Frank’s work and turned it into the famous album cover that we all know and love.

The final product is below:


It’s fitting that Frank, an exile himself, would create the image of one of the greatest works about exile and American life. Frank was also a filmmaker, and he filmed the band on their 1972 tour supporting the album he photographed. His filmed was called Cocksucker Blues and it was never officially released due to it being too obscene. Imagine that.


The photographers who revolutionised album art
Man Ray nearly did a Rolling Stones cover, Big Star went for William Eggleston’s most famous ceiling shot, and George Michael lifted a Weegee photograph. A curious new exhibition for nerds and fans alike shows the hits and misses of album artwork – and the covers too rude to use

Sean O'Hagan

Fri 10 Jul 2015 18.19 BST Last modified on Sat 11 Jul 2015 00.13 BST

The Rolling Stones album cover design by Man Ray.
The greatest record cover that never was? ... Man Ray’s original Rolling Stones cover for Exile on Main Street. All photographs courtesy Les Rencontres d’Arles

In 1972 Charlie Watts, drummer of the Rolling Stones, met with Man Ray and asked if he would design the cover for the group’s new album, Exile on Main Street. The 82-year-old artist agreed and produced a design in which the faces of the five Rolling Stones appeared inside black circles on a white background. The inspiration, he said, was the song Tumbling Dice, the first single from the album.

Man Ray’s design is one of the great record covers that never happened. The album appeared instead with a sleeve by the great American photographer Robert Frank, whose black-and-white collage of Super 8 images (shot in a tattoo parlour somewhere on Route 66 while he made his groundbreaking book The Americans) is now considered one of the classic rock album sleeves.

Radio City by Big Star, with William Eggleston photography
Radio City by Big Star, which uses William Eggleston’s classic red ceiling shot

Man Ray’s proposed cover for the Stones is one of the highlights of a sprawling, but always intriguing, exhibition at Les Rencontres d’Arles called Total Records: The Great Adventure of Album Cover Photography.

It traces pop’s relationship with photography using album sleeves that span the history of vinyl recordings, and includes work by pioneering photographers who were either commissioned by labels to shape the identity of an artist or else allowed existing images to be used, often at the musician’s request. That was how Anders Petersen’s picture of an embracing couple from his gritty series Cafe Lehmitz ended up on the cover of Rain Dogs by Tom Waits, an almost perfect reflection of the melancholic music therein. (Intriguingly, the man in the photograph bears a resemblance to the young Tom Waits, both physically and in terms of the beatnik-barfly image Waits once projected.)

Another photograph that effortlessly evokes the music is Cat Power’s use of an Emmet Gowin portrait for Headlights – the boy’s rapt expression at one with Power’s dreamy, dislocated songs. Likewise, the Memphis cult band Big Star’s use of their fellow southerner William Eggleston’s famous red ceiling (Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973) for their 1974 album Radio City. Oddly, Eggleston does not receive a section to himself here, with only Big Star and two Primal Scream covers on show – the Dixie Narco EP and the Give Out But Don’t Give Up cover. There’s no sign of Alex Chilton’s Like Flies on Sherbert, or Here Come the Snakes by Green on Red, or two other Primal Scream sleeves – Country Girl and Dolls – all of which used the great man’s images.

Cat Power's Headlights cover artwork by Emmet Gowin. 
Cat Power’s Headlights cover uses an Emmet Gowin photograph.

Among the biggest surprises here is the discovery that Richard Avedon shot the dramatic cover for Fresh by Sly and the Family Stone and the stark portrait of Simon and Garfunkel for Bookends. In each instance, Avedon’s black-and-white images utterly compliment the music, the one energetic and exuberant, the other intimate and sad.

The great Lee Friedlander receives his dues for his pioneering work for Atlantic Records in the 1960s, including unforgettable portraits of John Coltrane and Charles Mingus. At the risk of sounding like a vinyl nerd – which I am – it would have been good to see his cover portrait of Loudon Wainwright III for the singer’s debut album, not least because it is one of the photographer’s few non-jazz album covers and because, again, it so perfectly captures the rawness of Wainwright’s world-weary songs.

Alongside Freidlander, Francis Wolff gets worthy attention for his timeless portrait photography for Blue Note Records, which all but established its identity as a label made by, and for, the knowledgeable.

A single from Sly and the Family Stone's Fresh with photography by Richard Avedon

More problematic is the use of great photographs in contexts that seem barely appropriate to either the music or the artist’s image – why a Weegee image adorns a George Michael album is anyone’s guess. Likewise the characteristically enigmatic Josef Sudek diptych that somehow ended up on a Beautiful South album. Here, musicians may be parading their good taste in visuals, but the images suffer by being reduced to something akin to tasteful adornments.

That Beautiful South album also features in a short series on censored covers – the woman with a gun in her mouth was replaced in some countries by teddy bears. Stranger still is the cover for a Mamas and Papas album in which they lounge, fully clothed, in a bath tub. In the censored version, an offending toilet bowl has been removed. One wonders how the Butthole Surfers ever got a record released.

One of the more intriguing mini-narratives is a wall devoted to photographs by Linda McCartney of the shoot for the Beatles’ final album, Abbey Road. Iain Macmillan’s cover shot – which was achieved in a 10-minute shoot from atop a ladder while policemen stopped traffic – has since become one of the most debated record sleeves of all time. A conspiracy theory had it that Paul McCartney was dead because he appeared barefoot. Here, he is pictured in one shot wearing sandals and, in another, chatting to an old lady on the pavement by the famous zebra crossing.

The Weegee photograph used by George Michael for his album Listen Without Prejudice

Next to the series is a raft of other covers that pastiche or pay homage to the iconic Abbey Road shot, including Armitage Road by the Heshoo Beshoo Group and Soulful Road by New York City. No Booker T and the MGs though!

As with any show as ambitious as this, there are inevitable omissions – incredibly, no Dylan, whose shape-shifting musical journey through the 60s can be traced in his album covers, from trad folkie to hipster poet and beyond.

And where are the Smiths’ covers selected by none other than Morrissey himself for their mix of quintessential northern Englishness and iconic pop cultural resonance. What an omission – even for an exhibition that is, at times, unapologetically and understandably Francophile (lots of Johnny Hallyday but, oddly, no Françoise Hardy.)

But there is more than enough here to keep the curious and the nerdish enthralled – and show that sometimes images really do speak as loudly as songs.








woensdag 28 augustus 2019

The photobooks of Contact Uitgeverij Amsterdam











Amsterdam tijdens de hongerwinter.

Amsterdam / De Bezoge Bij/ Uitgeverij Contact / 1947 / First edition / 72 p. / cb. in wrappers / b&w photographs / NN / Buch / Zeitgeschichte, Zweiter Weltkrieg - Photographie - Anthologie - Nederland, Niederlande, Amsterdam - 20. Jahrh. - Andriesse, Emmy - Blazer, Carel - Breyer, Charles - Oorthuys, Cas - Taconis, Kryn - Windig, Ad

Amsterdam tijdens de hongerwinter by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger in : The Photobook: A History volume I
The book was published two years after the liberation of Holland from the Nazis. It marks both an end and a beginning. When it was published, the leading members of the Underground Camera group, like the country, were about to move on. As members of a new group, GKf, most of them took part in the exhibition 'Foto'48'. Amsterdam tijdens de hongerwinter looked back, while 'Foto'48' looked forward, but both shared a manifesto that made a passionate plea for an anti-formalist documentary photography that would help forge a more just and free Holland, following the occupation.
Thus this not simply a book remembering and commemorating Amsterdam's dreadful winter of 1944-5, but also a political rallying cry for the future. As the journalist Max Nord wrote in the book's introduction: 'Was it not those times that we dreamed our most beautiful dreams?...While uniformed Germans marched along Amsterdam's canals, their clipped songs resounding past the overcrowed prisons, we had a clear vision of the most perfect freedom.'
Nevertheless, the publication's first task was to bear witness, as photographers like Cas Oorthuys and Emmy Andriesse knew when they made these pictures, often at some risk. The story told is of extreme hardship - hunger, poverty and cold. People stand in food queues of search desperately for firewood, while others lie dead or dying on the streets. But, it also showed resilience and resistance: the forging of identity cards, the printing of underground magazines. Much of the book is shot in a style that could be ragarded as the opposite of formalist - not exactly anti-formalist, but a mode where the primary considerartion was getting the picture, no matter how out-of-focus or blurred it might have been. This snatched, off-kilter approach generated an immediate, spontaneous aesthetic of its own, which fed directly into postwar Dutch photography in an extremely positive way. So this was an important book in that sense also. It was a landmark publication by a group of photographers with both an ethical and an aesthetic attitude, a group who would exert a great influence on Dutch photography and the Dutch photobook in the late 1940s and 50s.

Views & Reviews Edges Harry Gruyaert Photography


Edges door Harry Gruyaert (Fotograaf)
Andere auteursCharles-Arthur Boyer (Voorwoord)
Mets & Schilt (2010), Editie: Photographic, This title was originally under the imprint of Mets & Schilt, 104 pagina's
The ‘edges’ that Harry Gruyaert, a pre-eminent member of the Magnum photo agency, explores in this incredibly lush, full-colour book, are the oceans, seas and rivers where humans meet the edge and the water begins. This unusual volume, which opens from the top up, takes the reader to Israel’s Dead Sea, the Mali River in Niger, the North Sea of Iceland, South Korea and Biarritz, as Gruyaert’s sensitive photos record the subtle chromatic vibrations of the edges of the Orient and the Occident. Gruyaert opposes the hustle of the city with a pared-down, yet intense, nature. His landscapes are never empty; they are inhabited places where light, colour, objects, people and situations weave a serene, sublime tableau.

This beautifully produced photographic manifesto reveals the profoundly poetic character of Harry Gruyaert’s work, and the sensual elegance of his faultless compositions.


HARRY GRUYAERT
Born in Belgium in 1941, Harry Gruyaert studied photography and film-making. He made a few films as director of photography for flemish television before turning to colour photographs in his adopted Paris in the early 1960s. By the end of the 1970s he had travelled to the United States, India, Egypt, Japan and Morocco. The latter was a revelation to Gruyaert whose images of the country were later published in two different books. In the early 1970s, while he was living in London, he worked on a series of colour television screen shots later to become the “TV Shots” now part of the Centre Pompidou collections. Around the same period he also photographed his homeland and produced two books, “Made in Belgium” and “Roots”. In 1982, he joined Magnum Photos. Among other importants works, the two editions of Rivages (Edges), published in 2003 and 2008, are the testimony of how Gruyaert likes to work in different environments, with contrasting lights and colours. He had a retrospective of his work in Paris in 2015 and is currently working on a major show due to open at the FOMU in Antwerp in 2018. He lives in Paris and is represented by Gallery 51 in Antwerp.

Instagram toen het nog niet bestond
Fotografie Lang voor Instagram werd al neergekeken op die warme snapshots in kleur. Maar kleurenfotografie van de ware meesters, uit de jaren vijftig tot tachtig, is weer volop in trek.

Rosan Hollak
9 mei 2017

Lartigue. Life In Color. Links: ‘Me, Florette’, Old Tucson Studios, Arizona, 1962. Rechts: ‘Florette and Pierre Sieard’, Palm Springs, California, April 1962.
Foto Abrams (2015) 

Het eenzame interieur van een kapperszaak. Een arm die uitsteekt tussen twee verschoten gordijnen. Snapshots op Instagram? Nee, kleurenfoto’s die Fred Herzog, een Duitse fotograaf die in de jaren vijftig van de vorige eeuw naar Canada emigreerde, in en rond Vancouver maakte. Zijn deels onbekende foto’s uit die periode werden eind vorig jaar gebundeld in Modern Color, een prachtig fotoboek vol warme Kodachrome-kleuren.

Modern Color is niet het enige fotoboek met oude kleurenfotografie dat recentelijk op de markt verscheen. Sinds een aantal jaar brengen uitgeverijen als Steidl en Hatje Cantz Verlag boeken uit met kleurenfotografie uit de jaren vijftig tot tachtig van de vorige eeuw. En ook in musea is een revival. Vorig jaar kwam het Amsterdamse fotografiemuseum Huis Marseille met een retrospectief van de Amerikaanse fotograaf Stephen Shore, pionier van de kleurenfotografie, van wie in november dit jaar in het Museum of Modern Art in New York een grote overzichtstentoonstelling staat gepland. Het Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam bracht met de tentoonstelling American Neon Signs by Day & Night een hommage aan kunstenaar Toon Michiels die midden jaren zeventig roadtrips maakte langs steden als Reno en Las Vegas. Fotografiemuseum Foam in Amsterdam toont op dit moment Los Alamos, de fotoserie van de Amerikaanse fotograaf William Eggleston die tussen 1965 en 1974 roadtrips maakte door de zuidelijke en westelijke staten van Amerika.

Smoothies
Waarom is die kleurenfotografie nu weer zo in trek? Hebben sociale media ermee te maken? Wie kijkt naar de beelden die nu worden gepost op Instagram, Snapchat of Facebook ziet dat het inmiddels een wijdverspreid gebruik is om foto’s te delen van een smoothie in een café, een hand met felgekleurde nagels of een schaduw op een muurtje. Het zijn fragmentopnames van kleine, alledaagse momenten, vaak opgeluisterd door een filtertje dat de sfeer van Kodachrome – de oude kleurenfilm van Kodak – weergeeft.

Die ogenschijnlijke terloopsheid kwam ook al terug in de beelden van Fred Herzog of Eggleston. Maar wat veel Instagramgebruikers als een vanzelfsprekendheid ervaren – het fotograferen van triviale momenten in kleur – werd destijds in de kunstwereld gezien als frivool of zelfs ronduit ordinair. De kleurenfotografie van Eggleston, voor het eerst getoond in 1976 in een solotentoonstelling in het MoMA, werd door collega’s verguisd. Grootheden als Walker Evans (‘Color photography is vulgar’) of Henri Cartier-Bresson haalden hun neus op voor de foto’s die Stephen Shore – hij heeft inmiddels een Instagram-account met ruim 890.000 volgers – in de jaren zeventig in de VS maakte van motelinterieurs, parkeerplaatsen of een pannenkoekenontbijt. De ware fotograaf maakte immers zijn beelden in zwart-wit. Kleurenfotografie was iets voor reclame- of amateurfotografen en werd geassocieerd met ‘het toeval’, zwart-wit fotografie symboliseerde ‘een existentiële visie op de wereld’.

Bovendien was er nog een praktische reden waarom men zich niet met kleurenfotografie bezighield: het was duur en arbeidsintensief. Terwijl veel fotografen in hun eigen doka zwart-witfoto’s konden afdrukken, moest de fotograaf die zich met kleur bezighield zijn werk laten afdrukken in een fotolaboratorium. Dat gold zeker voor Eggleston, die experimenteerde met het Dye Transfer-procedé, een peperdure druktechniek waarbij kleuren uit een enkel kleurennegatief in fases opnieuw werden samengevoegd tot een volledige kleurenfoto op papier.

William Eggleston. Portraits. Links: ‘Untitled’, 1965 (Memphis, Tennessee), Rechts: ‘Untitled’, 1965-8 (Memphis, Tennessee).
Foto National Portrait Gallery Publications (2016)

Dat arbeidsintensieve proces lijkt nu onwerkelijk, in een tijd waarin een soortgelijke foto, met behulp van een smartphone en een bewerkingsprogrammaatje, zo is gemaakt. Maar wie goed kijkt naar de beelden van deze vroege meesters kan wel degelijk zien hoeveel schoonheid er in de foto’s schuilt. Nergens is rood zo rood als in de afdrukken van Eggelston. Of neem de diepe zwart- en roodtinten in de afdrukken van de Antwerpse Magnum-fotograaf Harry Gruyaert die in de jaren tachtig de verlopen moderniteit van België en Frankrijk vastlegde.

Ballon voor een gezicht
Gruyaert, de Europese pionier van de kleurenfotografie die in 2015 een overzichtstentoonstelling had in Parijs, had een opvallende blik als het ging om lijnen en vormen. Een ballon voor een gezicht, een vrouw half in de schaduw, het zijn weloverwogen composities. Deze kunst werd al eerder geperfectioneerd door de Amerikaanse fotograaf Saul Leiter. In de jaren vijftig van de vorige eeuw struinde hij met zijn camera door de straten van New York. Maar zijn fotoboek Early Color, inmiddels een klassieker, werd pas in 2006 voor het eerst bij Steidl uitgegeven. Zijn beelden, die ook wel worden omschreven als urban visual poetry, lijken op gelaagde, abstracte composities die doen denken aan schilderijen van abstract-expressionistische schilders als Barnett Newman of Mark Rothko. Waar een ander aan voorbij zou lopen, bevroor Leiter een gebeurtenis tot verstilde schoonheid.

FOTOBOEKEN MET VROEGE KLEURENFOTOGRAFIE UIT DE VORIGE EEUW:

Kodachrome. Luigi Ghirri. Mack, 2017

Fred Herzog. Modern Color. Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2017

Langdon Clay. CARS - New York City, 1974-1976, Steidl, 2016

Harry Gruyaert. Harry Gruyaert/ Magnum Foto’s. Uitgeverij Hannibal, 2015

William Eggleston. Portraits. National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2016.

William Eggleston. The Democratic Forest, selected works. David Zwirner Books/Steidl. 2016

Lartique. Life in Color. Samengesteld door Martine d’Astier en Martine Ravache. Abrahms, New York, 2015

Saul Leiter. Early Color. Steidl, 2008.

Het zijn die korte momenten, die destijds met zoveel zorg werden vastgelegd – Eggleston vermeed het woord ‘snapshot’ – die de Instagram-generatie nu opnieuw kunnen inspireren. Dat verklaart wellicht de hernieuwde aandacht voor deze pioniers van de kleurenfotografie. Want hun moderne blik op de wereld is herkenbaar. Destijds had Eggleston er al een term voor: de ‘democratic camera’. Alles wat hij vastlegde, vond hij even belangrijk. Een persoon op straat, een verkeersbord, een glas waar het zonlicht doorschijnt.

De aandacht die hij schonk aan het alledaagse is inmiddels normaal geworden en maakt nu deel uit van onze democratische blik op de wereld. Met als verschil dat wij alles wat wij zien, met een paar eenvoudige handelingen kunnen delen met de rest van de wereld. Dat was wel anders voor die ploeterende fotografen die, vaak dagen achtereen, in eenzaamheid over de straten slenterden, op zoek naar een moment van schoonheid. Zij waren hun tijd ver vooruit. Hun zorgvuldige blik op de wereld heeft onze snelle visie op het bestaan beïnvloed. Door hen zijn we de wereld gaan bewonderen in al haar details.

Het verklaart waarom we het nu normaal vinden om in het museum te kijken naar een foto van een felgekleurd reclamebord aan een gevel. Of naar het beeld van een eenzame glijbaan op het strand. Niet zo gek dus dat deze oude kleurenfotografie opnieuw aan populariteit wint. Want ja, inderdaad, we begrijpen nu dat er schoonheid schuilt in een opwaaiend plastic zakje. Of in het schuim van een zorgvuldig geprepareerde cappuccino. Daar mogen we mensen als Herzog, Shore of Leiter dankbaar voor zijn.

Een versie van dit artikel verscheen ook in NRC Handelsblad van 10 mei 2017















Porträt Louise Anna Kubelka: 1978-1996 wöchentlich fotografiert Friedl Kubelka Erik Kessels Special Books Photography


Friedl Kubelka: Portrait of Louise Anna Kubelka 

Friedl Kubelka is one of the most renowned art photographers in Austria. In 1998 she completed one of her central works, namely the portrait of her daughter Louise Anna from birth to adulthood. This exceptional body of work is being exhibited and published for the first time in its entirety. 

Since the early seventies Friedl Kubelka has focused on time structure as a parameter of expansion of the single photograph in her multi-part portrait-tableaus. "Time structure gives the form to the information rather than emphasizing the authenticity" (Friedl Kubelka). 

The weekly portrait of her daughter Louise Anna over a period of 18 years documents not only the process of growing up or the development of a mother - daughter relationship, but also explores the process of photographic depiction and multi-layeredness of the photographic moment. A catalog will be published on the occasion of the exhibition: 30x38 cm, 36 pages, with a text by Anette Michelson. 

Friedl Kubelka: Portrait Louise Anna Kubelka, Fotohof 1998.

...a headshot photo of her daughter every Monday from the first day of her daughter's life until her 18th year.
This act of "Monday photo," as her daughter Louise came to call it, is part ritual, part performance, part obsession.

Arranged in grids of 52 photographs and starting in 1978, we see the passing of 18 years and how it shapes a young woman's face as in a time-lapse film. The framework of photographing Louise's head in close-up against a neutral background accentuates the seeming difference in her moods although photography is too slippery a liar for a true reading.

...her "seriousness" seems to be something she grows into as she ages into her teen years.

By 9 or 10 Louise seems to be shaping her own identity and self-representation apart from her mother. Her hair styles vary and blank spaces appear in the grids where a Monday photo was missed. By the last year, the 18th, only 12 images appear in the first few months until finally the ritual is broken.

In some ways, this work is a display of a coerced collaboration that even Louise has questioned. "I have asked myself whether my mother had the right to use me as an object in this way."

RELATED PHOTO PROJECTS

OTHER ‘PASSAGE OF TIME’ PORTRAIT PROJECTS

  • OPALKA 1965/1–∞ (1965–present)
    Roman Opalka, after every day of painting numbers in his studio, photographs his face. If only we could see documentation of the entire sequence.
  • Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1972)
    Eleanor Antin diets for 45 days. It is a performance piece, sculpture, photo project, and seminal work of feminist art.
  • The Brown Sisters (1975–present)
    Nicholas Nixon photographs the Brown sisters.
  • The Arrow of Time (1976–present)
    Diego Golberg and family sit down on June 17 for a family ritual.
  • One Year Performance (1980–1981)
    Tehching Hsieh punches a time clock hooked up to a camera in a gallery every hour on the hour for a year. A huge Thank You to Alberto Frigo for sending me the link!
  • Portrait of Louise Anna Kubelka (1980–1998)
    Friedl Kubelka documents the development of her daughter, from birth to adulthood.
  • The Downward Spiral (1983?–1997?)
    "Maria Ramos" as photographed by the New York City Police Department.
  • Everyday (1987 February 23–present)
    Karl Baden is second only to Roman Opalka for the logevity and glorious perfection of his daily photo project.
  • Time of my Life (1991 June 01–present)
    Dan Hanna spins with the sun in this daily aging project.
  • The Adaption to My Generation (1998 October 01–present)
    This is where I fit into the scheme of things, case you were wondering.
  • daily performances (1999 July 24–2009)
    Marc Tasman receives a package of Polaroid film and begins a ten-year process of daily performances in Polaroid
  • La Photo-Sculpture (1999–2006)
    Odile Marchoul discovers 'Photo-Vision' and decides to make identity pictures weekly.
  • Noah K. Everyday (2000 January–present)
    Noah Kalina uses his video camera to try and pinpoint the stages in his life when he's changed.
  • Metabolismo alterado (2000?)
    Héctor Falcón seems to start bodybuilding for art's sake, though I can't be totally sure as I don't understand Spanish.
  • Alarm Clock Self-Portaits (SnoozeButton) (2001?–2004?)
    Dean Baldwin hacks his alarm clock to shoot a digital photograph when he hits the snooze button. Check out his sleeping partners!
  • Hocking DPP (2001 September–present)
    Pete Hocking takes a daily self-portrait and posts it to the internet. He also finds that he becomes the object of the bear community's desire, as well as a few jackasses'.
  • Me (2001 November–present)
    Ahree Lee makes a nice video of three years of everyday photographs.
  • eyemachine (2002 January 01–present)
    Andy Luginbühl takes the portraits, and then set up a system to animate the images with the eyes lined up. I did this with a year's worth of images manually a few years ago. I'd never do it manually again...
  • 09h09 (2002 September 18–present)
    Jean-Michel Gobet takes a photo at 09:09 every day and blogs about it. What's more amazing is that he's awake at 09:09 every day!
  • Lebensbilder [Life Pictures] (2002 December, 2003 October, 2004 April–present)
    Tom, Ralf, and Michaela make the daily photo a German family affair.
  • O's Daily Photo (2003 January 01–present)
    Orin's image collection was randomly found while I was self-servingly looking at my standings in various search engines. She definitely has more interesting t-shirts than I've seen lately. And that domain name is hilarious.
  • Daily Jason (2003 January 06–present)
    Jason Fletcher does the 'Daily Photo Project' with goofy faces and on crack.
  • John Stone Fitness (2003 January 06–present)
    John Stone pasty and flabby --> --> --> John Stone tan and cut. Quite possibly the freakest thing I have ever seen.
  • Russian DPP (2003 August 02–present)
    Vadim Malguine shaves his head and starts taking photographs.
  • Daily Marqs (2003 August 27–present)
    Markus does the daily photo 3/4 shot.
  • Jeden Tag eins mehr... (2003 September 25–present)
    German Stephan H. Schumann is yet another daily shot-maker.
  • Twindex (2003 November 23–present)
    Welcome at[sic] the Daily Photo Project from Sven and Tobias Staude! Twins doing daily photos. It'll be really sad when one dies.
  • Daily Photo Project (2003 November 23–2006 April 14)
    Phil McCombs is another daily dude, though he has some serious lapses in documentation.
  • Ellora Klein (2004–present)
    Arno Klein's working on the full documentation of daughter Ellora. Includes video.
  • Self Portrait (2004 May 14–2005 September 03)
    Trey Bean documents his self portrait via Quicktime.
  • :18 Project (2004 July–2006 January)
    Christine Gatti takes two photos 18 minutes after every hour, every day for 18 months. She takes one self-portrait, and then one of the environment she is in at that time. Amazing work.
  • Olivia Project (2004 July 25–2004 December 25)
    Imelda's friend Olivia Juliana Lyles DeLuna gets her picture taken and her mom posts it on the web. How very cute! I think this project stopped at Christmas-time...bummer.
  • Bent Lips (2004 July 25–2005 July 25)
    Priscilla smiles, and smiles, and smiles. Let's hope she keeps it up for longer than a year!
  • Me, Myself, and I > 27up (2004 September 16–2009 April 24)
    Matthias Hupp starts the craze in Germany, in Black & White.
  • Daily Fratze (2005 August 04–present)
    MC Winkels from Germany...
  • Daily Fratze (2005 August 07–present)
    Michael Simons from Germany is apparently inspired by MC Winkels from Germany... Now a site that "is a small community centered around daily photo projects. You'll find a place with room for narcissism, discussion, in short: documented lives."
  • Jeder-Tag (2006 January 01–present)
    Anthoney from Germany is yet another white guy who looks like he's in IT doing a daily photo.
  • Russell Higgs (2006 July 21–present)
    Russell's only been at it for a couple months, but I am flabbergasted at the results so far.
  • yyyymmdd (2006 November 10–present)
    Taylor Everett's personal daily photo adventure.
  • Jedentag (2007 January 01–present)
    Dimitri comes from Germany/Berlin and he takes every day pictures.
  • Everyday from Birth (2007 January 22–2008 January)
    David P Craig's parents attempt to make him a daily-documented boy.
  • Daily Photo Project (2007 January 31–present)
    Skip Hursh adds to the daily photo milieu.
  • everyday (2007 February 07–present)
    Mark Curry's another fine young lad making his way along the daily photo journey.
  • Cheri Cheri Lady (2007 March 21–present)
    Kotla: “I’m imitating others, because I can't change.”
  • My Maya-a-Day (2007 March 24–present)
    Ben Udkow gets his Maya to be in front of the camera every day since birth.
  • 13 to Infinity (2007 April 07–present)
    David Hinds makes it over 9 months and hopes to continue FOREVER!
  • Documentation of Decomposition (2007 December 19–2008 October 02)
    Sean Hunt MacLean adds his face to the growing collection of Daily photographers.
  • Blog Begins At Forty (2009 March 26–present)
    gedek! begins at forty, who knows when he'll end...
  • Le blog de photos-tous-les-jours (2011 February 14–present)
    Ganael Portet adds himself to the list.
OTHER OBSESSIVE PHOTO PROJECTS


  • Exactitudes (1994–present)
    photographer Ari Versluis and stylist Ellie Uyttenbroek work together to systematically document the striking dress codes of various social groups. Very nice. indeed.
  • 20 Sites n Years (1973–present)
    Tom Phillips photographs 20 South London sites annually, in order, at the same time of day.
  • Invincible Cities (1977–present)
    Along the same lines as above, Camilo Jose Vergara has been documenting America's ghettos by photographing the built environment in Harlem, the South Bronx, Chicago, Newark and other places since the 1970's.
  • Photo of the Day (1979 March–1997 October)
    Hugh Crawford and Betsy Reid's digital version of Jamie Livingston's 'Photo of the Day' Polaroid project.
  • ID400 (1998?)
    Tomoko Sawada gets in the photo booth for 400 different personas, including her own. [
    her site]
  • First Day (1999 january–present)
    First Day Photography will sell you a photo of the sunrise on your special day.
  • Eat 22 (2001 March–2002 March)
    Ellie Harrison documents everything she eats for one full year.
  • Get In My Belly! (2002 October–present)
    Adam Seifer documents everything (not really) he eats.
  • Pasta-Log Yet another documentation of food, this time, only pasta, and framed beautifully.
  • American Mile Markers Matt Frondorf drives across the USA (New York to San Fran) taking a photo every mile.
  • 30fpd: a day, a week, a year (2003 January 08–present)
    Aaron Ximm is making a movie of his life, one second at a time.
  • Doors I Touched Today (1999 June 03)
    Fluxus Midwest researches the action of doors and knobs.
  • Every Object Interaction (2003 September–present)
    Alberto Frigo photographs and catalogues every object he interects with. It seems like he has almost replaced one of his hands with a camera. At the time he sent me this link, there were 23'308 images entered into the database.
  • 365 Polaroids (1997)
    Andy Walker presents a year's worth of polaroid self-portraits.
  • One a Day Project (2002)
    Aimee Sealfon interacts with, then photographs, 365 people.
  • The Shower Project (1999)
    Brian Benson's successful (?) attempt to shower with 100 different women.