A series of poloarid photos of everyday life, indeed one for EVERY day from March 1979 to October 1997. No explanations, no words but the dates themselves. If you like a mystery, go straight to http://photooftheday.hughcrawford.com/ and see if you can piece together the story yourself. I wish I’d done that, instead of googling to find out more.

Still here?

The fascinating story of one person’s unravelling of the story behind ‘Some Photos of That Day’ is here on the Mental Floss blog.

Basically, a New Yorker named Jamie Livingston took a photo for every day of the last eighteen years of his life. Right up to the day he died.

His death haunts me. The last series of photos have so much gravity and sadness even when people are smiling. I saw them without knowing what was going on, but I sensed it was something important and sad.

I can taste death in the series of photos running into this final blurred one, which seems as close as we can get to a picture of what death feels like.

In 2001, I attempted the same project, but I only lasted nine months. I wish I’d kept it up. The shopkeeper in Paul’s Auster film, Smoke, does it too, but he takes a picture of the same street corner each day.

The final effect of Jamie Livingston’s art is a portrait of life which can’t be achieved through any shortcut.  Some novels try to do something like what he has done, but they cannot. It is a gradual, steady, banal masterpiece.