portrait project

This all started when one of the community sites I frequent added the ability to feature a picture on the user profile page. So back in March of 2002 I snapped my first cruddy self-portrait using my web cam and posted it there. Every once in awhile I'd decide to change the pic, so I'd get out the cam again, snap another, and replace the old one with the new.

Then some time in the middle of that summer a certain incident happened a couple of times that made me stop and think. On two different occasions I ran into old friends or acquaintances that I hadn't seen in a couple of years, and... they didn't recognize me. At all. These were people I used to see on a regular basis at one time not terribly long ago, but it wasn't until I opened my mouth and started talking did the little lightbulb of recognition go off over their heads.

Needless to say, this threw me for a bit of a loop. Did I really look that different? I started to think about the pictures I'd been taking. I couldn't really compare with how I looked a couple of years ago, since I don't have any pictures of me from then. But I could start to make a regular habit of taking a picture of myself once a month, just for the hell of it. As I mentioned, I was doing this approximately every month for the community site anyway, so it was just a matter of remembering to take at least one picture per month.

The result is gathered here as a series of pictures of me, taken by me, from the past year plus. And, strangely enough, I do look pretty different in each one (though some of that is due to my poor photography skills). I'm not sure for how long I'll keep doing this, but below are links to all of the monthly pictures, each with a little commentary:

2002
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December

2003
January
February
March
April
May