Here’s a note from Hugh Crawford to Chris Higgens in response to his post, He took a Polaroid, Until The Day He Died on Mental Floss:

The Photo of That Day project is a work in progress, and the site was put up partly to help coordinate the effor 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.

Once in an incident too complicated to relate here many of Jamie’s
possessions got put out on the street by a landlord picked up by the Department of Sanitation.

Fortunately the truck was intercepted by Jamie and friends en route and they
dumped an entire garbage truck load of garbage out on a NYC pier and sifted through it to recover the photos.

Some of the photos were lost then and in other random incidents while traveling etc. There were other times where there were no photos taken, often while filming in exotic parts of the world where it turned out that there was no Polaroid film.

The photos marked with the orange Xs are photos that I had to re-shoot after a hard drive crash.

It’s kind of cool having someone wander into the site and figure it out. I’m sort of enjoying that mystery aspect of it.

We were all quite amazed at the  personal connection people who didn’t know Jamie made with the work. One of the striking things at the show was that students at Bard were looking at the pictures as a full life experience to aspire to, at the same time that his friends were commemorating a life cut short.

The POD above shows the Polaroids in the suitcases Jamie used to organize them.