A lot of folks have pointed their blogs towards the Noah Kalina’s striking Noah takes a photo of himself everyday for 6 years video. It’s quite a work. Kalina literally maps out the trajectory of his ovoid face (actually, the same shape as mine) by linking together thousands of still photographs that document his appearance every day for six years.
The entirety of the video, over the course of 5 minutes, runs quickly on YouTube but not so fast that you can’t tell how his surroundings changed during that time. The music, a beautiful though derivative score by Carly Comando, is also mesmerizing and moving and the video takes you down the slow-fast road of a single person’s life over quite a few years. You can see his hairline recede, his eyes sinking into his skull, his skin becoming more sallow, his cheeks losing their elasticity. You can see the rapid growth of hair and the solidity of his forehead but it is his eyes that, centered, lay claim to one’s imagination. His eyes stare at you, forming a relationship with you that is at once pleading and callow.
When I was at Brown, a guy named Jay Stuckey photographed himself for a year and put up the resulting Polaroids on the wall for a big show. It’s not a big deal to shoot yourself over the course of six years and make a nice video. But, in an age of publicly accessible obscurity and at a time of erased identities, I found Mr. Kalina’s work very unassuring and depressive in outlook, not unlike the 21 Up series that continues to captivate.
My hope: that Mr. Kalina continues with his project for another 44 years and that, 44 years from now, I would have the honor of watching 50 years of his life disappear on a screen.