Hugh Crawford is continuing to improve the Jamie Livingston site, which is much more robust and seems able to handle the large volume of traffic it is getting.

Big News: Many of the X pictures have been replaced with real photos, as have the pictures with Hugh’s finger and a date on a Post-it. Hugh thinks there are only a few missing photos now.

MyFox has an extensive article about Jamie and the site:

‘Polaroid a Day’ Chronicles a Life 

Jamie Livingston’s Photo Project Finds an Audience Online 

http://www.myfoxny.com/myfox/pages/ContentDetail?contentId=6654456

So does Time.com. Betsy found this post by Richard Lacayo on Time.com’s art and architecture blog.

Something about Livingston’s project reminded me that towards the end of his life the photographer Garry Winogrand shot rolls and rolls of film almost aimlessly, just pointing the camera out the window of his car. I think Winogrand was looking for whatever you find when you let go as best you can of the structures of art. (That was an idea that was also basic to what Robert Rauschenberg was doing sometimes.) And I ‘ve always been fascinated by an old movie by the Swiss director Alain Tanner, In the White City. Bruno Ganz plays an engineer on an oil tanker who jumps ship in Lisbon and stays there, periodically sending home to his girlfriend a home movie of his aimless days. By the time he makes the last film his life is dissolving into pure weightless existence, and the movie is just footage of streets going by underfoot.

After Livingston’s death, his pictures were organized by two friends into a show they mounted last year at Bard College, which is where he had begun the series when he was a student there. This kind of pure steady documentation can be very powerful. The Livingston project, because of the way it ends, is heartbreaking, but also wonderful in its attention to every little bit of life. The combination of easy digital photography and the Internet will create more of these sustained accounts of everydayness. (It already has. In the last few years a couple of guys made projects of taking a picture of every meal they ate for a year.) Flickr is a public library of photo diaries. But I’m betting that this one will always be one of the form’s monuments, built one little piece at a time.