I spent the last day of 2011 freezing and starving my butt off in Times Square for around eleven hours. It was the sort of experience that you have to have for yourself in order to realize that you’ll never, ever want to do it again. It looks all fun and exciting, but you can’t really make a sound judgment about actually being in Times Square on New Years, rather than watching it televised in your warm living room while sipping sparkling cider, unless you’ve done it. Kind of like this 365 project. I had to do it, finish it, experience it, in order to be able to make an educated statement about it.
If you think about it, the idea of picking a moment out of every day to photograph is maddening. It means that you are consciously reducing every instant you experience in a day down to one that you will choose to remember, be it good or bad. As time passes, your memory of that day, that time, is isolated to what you see in that picture. It’s as if you actively choose what will stay with you. What if you choose wrong? What if years later, the photo you look back on wasn’t quite true to the reality of what you experienced? The problem is, those times I thought too much about whether I was choosing the right moment to capture, I ended up capturing nothing at all.
I had to live this 365 in order to judge it - and I now fully realize how malleable memory is and how important photographs are in influencing them. Because even if I picked the wrong moment to capture every day, I still did capture a moment; and now I have it to look back on forever. It may not have been perfect, but I did it. It was a test of willpower and a hassle and a challenge, but the little bits and pieces I captured during this past year, I will never lose.
