Ten Year Leap - The Photo of the Day project 1999/2009

Towards the end of 1998 I began to think about a kind of photographic diary project I wanted to pursue the following year. At the time I was living in London working in the TV industry as a production freelancer. I was twenty-nine years old, sharing a rented flat, and struggling to make ends meet. I had a boyfriend and lots of friends but I was a bit bored. I suppose like a lot of people I was beginning to want to change my life, to do something amazing and different, but I didn’t know what. I had the creeping suspicion that my life was rushing past a bit too quickly, but that I wasn’t really going anywhere. Perhaps it was all that fuss people seemed to want to make about the end of the millennium –that we were supposed to feel lucky to be alive at such an important milestone in civilisation. But at the same time I found it hard to see any meaning in all the celebrations, prophesising and doom-mongering that was going on around me. So I decided I would mark the final year of the old millennium by carrying my camera around with me wherever I went and taking a photograph every day. I felt that by doing this I might be able to slow things down a bit, mark time and make each day matter a bit more. I had written a diary every day from the age of 13 until I went to University at the age of 19, but when I’d read them back as an adult I’d been disappointed by how trivial they were, how obsessed with daily routine and the minutiae of teenage gossip. They were frankly embarrassing.  Taking a photograph every day would be a return to that kind of serial record-keeping, but it would be less personal and more coolly observational– or so I thought at the time.

The rules I set myself were the following:

• That I must go out of my way to take at least one picture every day on my Konika pop camera.
• That I would then send the films off to be processed by a company called Tripleprint. (This was a cheap, postal developing service that marketed itself on providing ‘one for the album, one for the wallet and one for a friend’. In other words you got a 6 x 4 print, and two miniature versions of the pictures attached to it. You also got a free film so the project could perpetuate itself in a way.)
• That once I had a batch of pictures developed I would mount them in a series of photo albums - one for each month of the year- that I bought from Paperchase. They had to be all the same size albums but they could be different colours.

And that was it – or so I thought.

Ten years have now passed since I started the project, and I have decided to repeat it this year. I still have the Konica Pop camera but I’ll be taking the photos of 2009 on a digital camera instead. And rather than having to send films away to be developed I will be able to upload the images directly onto the virtual album of this website.  I will present each new picture alongside its 1999 photo of the day and write a brief account of the latter to offer some kind of context. I’m interested in finding out if the photos jog my memory, and if they can in anyway bridge the person I was ten years ago, with the person I am now. Not that much has changed – and at the same time, everything had changed. Looking back over the photos makes time seem less linear, and more like a stacked pack of cards. Yesterday feels as long ago as ten years ago, and 1999 feels sometimes closer than 2008.

Some of these pictures depict people I’m no longer in touch with, others contain secrets I’m not really sure I want to share, a few are really brilliant and I’m so glad I had my camera with me on those days, at that precise moment. Having said that, many of the pictures are very dull, and like my adolescent diaries depict nothing more than the boring minutiae of everyday life – meals cooked, journeys to work, the interior of the flat I was living in, the exterior of the businesses I worked at. In the end the year turned out to be one of the most eventful of my life – I went to America, I met my future husband, I turned thirty, my brother was diagnosed with cancer, I got a tattoo, and at the end of it all, the Millennium finished, and despite what we all thought might happen, the world carried on.

photos and words copyright tenyearleap.com 1999-2009