JONATHAN KELLER: the adaption to my generationwww.c71123.com/daily_photo
There’s a certain Twilight Zone quality to Jonathan Keller’s daily photo project. When
you see hundreds of his images lined up at once, they start to resemble a yearbook for a
high school with only one student. Or perhaps the collective mug shots of a very unlucky
criminal. Keller, a graduate student at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield
Hills, Mich., has taken a photo of himself every day for the past eight years. (There was
one lapse early on when he worked as a janitor in Antarctica.)
Each image is a simple head-and-shoulder shot set against a white background. Keller
holds his arm out, frames the image on his digital camera’s screen and snaps away. He
never smiles, because his expressionless face is the easiest way to achieve a blank canvas.
“I’m obsessive compulsive,” he says. “I will do this for the rest of my life.” Quite literally,
this is an effort that ends only with its creator’s death, and it’s this cumulative data set
that gives the project real heft.
There’s no simple answer for why Keller keeps up his picture taking, and he doesn’t
have a clear memory of the idea’s genesis. Nonetheless, he and his site visitors have made
some interesting discoveries: Keller doesn’t change his shirt everyday, and he became
really thin when he trained for a marathon. It’s also fascinating to figure out how long
it took him to grow a mustache or make the shift from short hair to long. Plus, Keller is
starting to notice the long-term changes in his appearance. “It’s going to be really interesting
when I start to lose my hair,” he says.
While these daily photos haven’t directly influenced his design work, Keller has discovered
something else: “I’ve learned that the art of collecting is good enough in and of itself.”
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