Jay Goldman

People keep asking me about why I’ve been doing the The Daily Mugshot you see in the sidebar at right (or don’t see if you’re not reading this on my website, but could see if you went to JayGoldman.com). It’s come up enough that I figured it was time to address it in a post that I can point inquiring minds to when they want to know.

Eldon Garnet Quote on Queen St. DVP Overpass Bridge by samehhanna

Primarily, it’s about recording the passage of time as it affects me. I spend a lot of time thinking about time, sometimes in a professional sense, sometimes in a personal one. I identify strongly with Eldon Garnet’s 1995 Time: And a Clock installation on Toronto’s Queen Street East, and particulary the quote along the top of the bridge:

This river I step in is not the river I stand in

I’m fascinated by the idea of time as a fisheye lens, with the present flared out and the past and future distorted into only the most important details. The discipline of taking a daily mugshot implicity divides my time into roughly twenty-four hour blocks, an artificial demarcation that reverts to the smooth flow of the river when you watch the mugshow. That division enforces the fisheye effect from my perspective, forcing a focus on the day-to-day task and keeping me in the distortion-free present.

There is an entire canon of day-in-the-life videos that have inspired this project. Keith Gould, who started TDM, lists two of them on The Daily Mugshot About page. Chris Nolan, a fellow member of the TorCamp community, sent a link to his own version when he saw that I had started mine. Although I have no hard proof, I suspect a lot of this can be traced back to Dan Hanna’s Daily Photo Aging Project, in which he has documented himself over a period of seventeen years using a custom-built rig and two 35mm cameras.

I’ll tell you one thing: I have a lot more respect for his determination and dedication than for my own daily iSight snap!

The mugshow has a secondary purpose not disimilar to why I keep this blog, tweet on Twitter, post photos to Flickr, or wrote The Facebook Cookbook: crafting a legacy. The fleeting passage of time and the certainty of your own mortality means that there will come a day when all of us no longer exist. Legacies used to be measured in terms of the land you owned, the offspring you offsprang, or the number of successive generations who kept your family business alive. For a select group of people, it was measured in the remainders of their reign or the linear feet of bookshelf occupied by their works. The Internet, in its role as great democratizer, has upset the status quo here as it has in so many other areas. Leaving a legacy is no longer an exclusive club for the few but rather an expansive free-for-all open to anyone with a connection and a web browser. To paraphrase badly: I take a daily mugshot because I do live in interesting times.