Memories / 365 Project

Back in 2008 I became really interested in taking photos and started a project which meant I had to take one photo every day. It lasted over 2 years until I felt like I wasn't really learning from it or enjoying the process any more, so I stopped. But I still have this catalogue of images marking out all this time. I've kept a bunch of stuff in digital storage for a while, and I've been looking over this mass of files I have just sitting on a hard drive. I really want to bring some of these things over to my blog to look at them and think about them and give them a little more purpose. A lot of the pictures I have are really awful in quality or just ugly, or they remind me of negative feelings. Some of them, though, make me smile, and remind me that lots of good and fun things have happened in every year of my life. Looking back at this project in particular also is kind of an amazing visual representation of the person I am absolutely not any more after 5-7 years.

31st June - 31st December 2008

I mean, I was a kid here. I went to Kingston College in 2007 to do Art, Media Studies, English, and Business Studies (how I ever thought taking Business Studies was a good idea for even a second of my life I will never know) and I hated it. I shaved my head and wore glasses I didn't like and I felt really self-conscious and gross and scared about becoming an actual real adult. I look at these picture mosaics and I feel like you can see in them how lost I was. I didn't know who I was or what I was doing, and I didn't like myself.

2009

It was an interesting project. One of my first considered attempts to really document something like this. I think towards the end you can see that my pictures are much more interesting and well composed and just generally better choices are being made. I stopped doing it partially because I felt that the pressure to take a photo every day was making the pictures I took stagnant and forced and not fun to take, but the thing is that now, in 2015, I pretty much do take photos every day - or at least most days - and there's nothing forced or unfulfilling about it. I know I'm much more at home with pretty constant creative production at this point because I'm pretty much always casually and lazily making something or recording something or writing something, or like, taking webcam selfies (the ultimate creative act!), but to see it measured against this is... really interesting. I feel like so much of a better, happier, more confident and sure and able person in every respect than I was 5 years ago, so it's bittersweet looking at these pictures, but I'm really happy. I want to share them here and kinda release them onto the internet or something.

1st January - 24th November 2010

Below are some of my favourite individual images from the project.

26th March 2009

I always liked this photo a lot, I think largely because I just loved drawing on my hand and it was a nice form of expression for me. Also the stylish black and white of course. I think I took this picture in a toilet cubicle. #glamorous

8th May 2009

This was part of my A level art final project. The dolls hanging up actually look a lot better than my final project did. I used them as stencils to spray paint around and made these awful paintings on wooden boards. I don't think I even have any pictures of them because they were just such a failure! I really don't know what possessed me to do this, but I guess I learned some kind of artistic lesson.

17th December 2009

It's a nice picture of my cat, Lewis. I'm sentimental about this one. I like the glowing alien cat eye look.

27th March 2010

I took my doll with me to Paris, to take photos with. This is a shot from my hotel room window (Hotel Amiot). There's just something about this entire thing that I love. The colours, the backdrop, the texture of the doll's hair. Everything about this makes me feel quite nice.

4th May 2010

Some aesthetically pleasing blobs of acrylic paint. I am still very impressed by paint blobs and probably always will be.

17th September 2010

Heart toast! The bread company Vogel's sent me a heart shaped toast cutter for writing limericks on their Facebook page. They also sent me a yard long loaf of bread. It was incredible.

10th November 2010

I must've taken so many pictures of my own eyes across my life, but the thing about this one is that you can see the iris quite clearly. I like my iris.

These next two pictures are not from this project, but they were taken with a similar attempt at random documentation in mind, so I've included them.

1st March 2012

This is a rare picture of both me and my bedroom in 2012. My bedroom was a bit of a weird messy jumble at this time, but for the first time ever I had glasses that I actually properly liked. I was slowly discovering how to be a comfortable human being in a comfortable cardigan.

1st March 2012

This is a picture from one of the first meetings I had with my bandmate, Ed. We must've been talking about visuals so he's in the middle of loading up his projector and it's pointed at a door. I thought it looked pretty cool and took a photo, but it's funny, this is part of such a bigger memory now.