From 2002 until 2018, I took a daily photograph and posted it to my website, The Daily Post. After each day’s posting I send a link to a list of subscribers. Visitors to the site can access that day’s photograph, click back through all the daily pages, or see any month since it began arranged in a “calendar” format. The index page displays the most recent seven postings at the top of text explaining the work. Each of these page types is displayed here to give a sense of what it is like to navigate the site. When I exhibit the Daily Post photographs, I print them out as large-scale grids.
When I take notice of the world am I always filtering it according to a set of internal demands? Or, can I maintain a openness to receive and transcribe coincidences the world might offer up? And what role does the camera and its own set of demands (frame, focus, length of exposure, sensitivity to light) play in all this?
The Daily Post is not about any particular subject beyond the fact of time’s passage. More than any other body of work it emphasizes a central question that has always compelled me to make pictures: where do photographs come from? I wonder this because my favorite photographs feel like gifts and just barely concoctions of my own.
I hope that making (or finding) a photograph every day, purposefully avoiding subject-based themes, and having an easily accessible archive catalogued by date, all combine to de-emphasize the photograph as a self-contained world and offer a means to consider more enthusiastically moments in life that catch the eye.
Much to my delight, the site has infected some of its visitors . People often tell me they like clicking through a few months or years worth of Daily Posts late at night. Some mention that they witnessed for themeselves a moment in their day ripe for posting. I am always curious to know what it was they noticed. I like hearing they were struck, that they encountered something they recognized in a new and unexpected way.
The Daily Post
The Daily Post is a web-based collection of photographs that grew by one entry each day, as its name suggests. The project began on March 27, 2002 and ended May 10, 2018.
"Heraclitus says somewhere that all things pass and naught abides; comparing things to the current of a river, he says you cannot step twice into the same stream." - Plato