In 2000 artist Noah Kalina started taking a photo of himself every day. In August 2006, he put together a nearly 6 minute video of these photos, chronicling over 2300 days, up on YouTube. It has since been viewed over 8 million times and has spawned a number of imitators (though it should be noted that some of these immitation videos were in progress before Kalina put his video on the web). What Kalina and others did always struck me as a good idea and a really interesting way to visually track the changes in our outward appearance. I started on a project of my own to take a daily picture of my face after seeing Kalina’s YouTube video, but I quickly found out that taking a picture of yourself every day can be a major pain in the butt.
A new web site, Daily Mugshot, plays off Kalina’s idea and offers tools that make it easier for people to track their own daily photographic evolution. Founder Keith Gould was clearly as intrigued as I was by Kalina and says he was inspired by him.
“The Daily Mugshot began when I came across a dude who took a picture of himself every day and turned it into a video. He had taken pictures of himself every day for years, and the video was amazing. I thought: I want to do that too,” says Gould on the Daily Mugshot site.
The site launched in closed beta last November and is still very much a work in progress. In addition to offering an application that allows users to take a photo of themselves with a web cam and archive it, the application also issues reminders when it is time to take a photo, and creates an embeddable widget slideshow of your pictures similar to Kalina’s video. A gallery on the site shows of these slideshows and allows people to comment on them.
For now the only way to get pictures into the app is via web cam, but Gould is working on adding upload functionality to the site.
While Daily Mugshot likely doesn’t have broad appeal and has limited use as a social network (Gould is planning to add some social features to help people keep track of specific mugshot users), it is a useful application for anyone who wants to create a daily picture chronicle. Gould created the site as a fun side project because he was inspired by a YouTube video and wanted to make the process of emulating Noah Kalina as painless as possible, and I think he’s succeeded.
The video that inspired the site:
