photo of the day

I'm totally blown away by this. You might look at this picture and say, "Eh! What's the big deal?" It's not a big deal, except that this is the first picture, taken on March 31, 1979, by a guy named Hugh Crawford. He decided on that day to take a Polaroid picture a day, and called the project something like Photo of the Day. He was 22 when he took this picture, and he took pictures almost every day without fail for a little more than eighteen years, until his untimely death shortly after his forty-first birthday. The website is indexed by month, and a click on the month brings up all of that month's photographs. I find myself just scanning through them, putting together an imaginary life story as I go. What strikes me most is that it looks like Hugh and I share the same birthday. He was born seven years before me, but right around October 28, or so it seems (because of several birthday cakes and party scenes in the photos). It is also very moving to see his illness and death captured in the Polaroids, the last one -- as with others in the serious -- obviously taken of him by someone else. I just thought it should be shared.