Today would have been artist Jamie Livingston’s 50th birthday. It is also the 10th anniversary of his death. The following was written by his friend Risa Mickenberg in 1997. An exhibit of Jamie’s 6.600 Photos-of-the-Day is on view at Bard College through October 27th, 2007. A web site of all the photo’s will be rolled out shortly.

It’s
strange for someone to leave behind a record of every day of their
life. Or to obsessively follow a project whose only perfect completion
ends with their death.

Our work is always ahead of us. It
starts when we are born and it ends when we die – this work of seeing,
touching and affecting the world.

Jamie spread this collection out every year and examined it – reviewed it.

Our
lives are a flood of images and we are collectors who keep a strange
assortment of images: moments of extreme emotion, pain, beauty, and
fear stand out. Events we’re taught to remember: weddings, graduations,
births, deaths.

Then there are the millions of images that we
can’t shake out of our heads, that come to us at strange times – things
we can’t remember why we remember: the gold threads in an old stereo
speaker, the way the light hit a thousand cars in a parking lot by the
water, the face of a stranger in a restaurant, a friend standing in a
pool – you can’t remember where, slapping the water with the flat of
her hand.

Memory is a sieve that holds curious things. A life is a trail of strange, colorful memories.

Jamie’s
Photo-of-the-Day works like a life. A still moment from every day for
years. Remains of the day, immortalized. It is a selection: what we
choose to remember, what we add to our collection of days.

There was no set time of day.  It was when the mood struck: this is what I will take.

It’s an accumulation, a collection, a life’s work.

Risa Mickenberg wrote this soon after Jamie’s death in 1997. She is a writer and a member of the band,  Jesus H Christ & The 4 Hornsmen of the Apocalypse.