Photoblogging: self-indulgent but damn cool

| | Comments (0)

I love photoblogs. And I visit several daily. They're a unique breed of photogalleries because they're not just about taking view-worthy photographs, but about recording the aesthetics of everyday life.

A few I particularly like: Ephermera, Heather Champ, Satan's Laundromat, Dooce's daily photo.

But perhaps my favorite is Matt Haughey's Ten Years of My Life. Matt's plan is to post a photograph every day for ten years. He started on his 31st birthday and plans to have quite the archive to reflect on by his 41st. It's been a year so far.

I love the deliberate introspection that fuels this site. It's a bit self-indulgent to publish it online, but I've already admitted that self-indulgence is my fuel, so that's hardly a negative by my judgment. If I had the ability to maintain a daily project, I'd love to do the same. If a picture's worth a thousand words, even a year's worth of archives tells volumes more than I'd normally write.

Each day's photograph has a bit of background and a title. Tiny, unobtrusive links under each photo take you to recent ones and the full archive, which has a thumbnail of each photographs posted so far (which means it loads slow, but I think Matt's still playing around with the archives). Clicking through them gives you a better idea of what he's been up to than what little he writes in his archives.

Matt uses MovableType (plus a few plugins) to make Ten Years of My Life work. If you want to do the same thing without having to set anything up, check out TypePad (the dummies' version of of MovableType), which has a photolog feature as part of its CMS. It's not free, but it's an extremely user-friendly and elegant system for publishing your photographs online.

Leave a comment

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by published on October 7, 2004 11:10 PM.

Digitally developing life's stories was the previous entry in this blog.

More than a picture is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.