I set up these pages to display daily photos from some of my other picture product web sites. Photos are chosen randomly, and change each day. No archive of these daily pictures is kept.
Daily Found Photo, from MyFoundPhotos.com:
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I collected found objects and photos for some time before indulging in an infatuation with slides. The color quality of old Kodachromes is amazing, but I was also drawn in by the intimacy of looking through abandoned family histories. How do these pictures end up in thrift shops and online auctions? The answers are probably simple, and not even shocking, but it still seems like family memories deserve some pride of place in the storage wars of posterity.
Daily Grave Portrait, from my collection of Sepulchral Portraits:
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I made a project some years ago of collecting gravestone portraits seen at New York City cemeteries. Thinking I had discovered an unknown and unappreciated genre I was chagrined (but not really surprised) to find that the subject matter of sepulchral portraits had been taken up by numerous other photographers. I first encountered these portraits while pursuing semi-professional work as a cemetery photographer (also known by the somewhat highfalutin term “forensic genealogist”) at New York’s cemeteries and burial grounds. But my particular interest in these pictures was not so much taphophilial as photographic. The style of early 20th-century portraiture is more rugged and natural, and I think far more interesting than the genre of today. Unlike today smiles in formal portraits were rare, and I feel like I am seeing the real person. Camera exposure times were very long, and forcing a smile for durations of many seconds was unnatural.
I stopped adding photos to this series when I found myself questioning the morals of the project.
Daily Receipt, from My Receipts:
One of the biggest casualties of a web server hack blowout that struck my web sites a couple of years ago was my receipts. All the multimedia and text content, including the sometimes lengthy back-stories behind some individual receipts, was blown away. I set up Dailyreceipts.net to try and restore some of the content from memory, but it’s been slow going. I might move the content of DailyReceipts.net to sorabji.com. Once in a while I look at my receipts and they make me feel sad.
Daily Umbrella, from my collection of Discarded Umbrella Carcass Photos:
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Photo collections of umbrella carcasses are nothing new. I add to this collection on occasion but I do not make a habit of heading outside during and after a rainstorm just for the sake of increasing my quantity of umbrella photos. I find the subject matter interesting. Objectifying a mundane object and lining up hundreds of them for ritualistic inspection can make almost anything look interesting. I recently started adding haiku-like poems to the bottom of the images, including a multi-part poem starting here and ending here. I added short lines of poetry for a few dozen of the umbrella pictures and will add more in the future.
