January 7, 2006 Five years ago, around this date, I began a project posting a photograph a day to my website. I thought at the time that it would begin to get interesting after five years, and that turned out to be about right. Regular visitors here will have figured out that I don't take pictures every day or try to be current in posting them. Depending on circumstances, each day's 'new' picture will be four to six weeks old. The photo series, after the first five entries, is in strict order of their making, though two or three times I have changed the order of two pictures made the same day. All the pictures are linked consecutively to each other. The 'forward' link on the newest picture leads uncreatively-Ouroborocally-back to the first. Days when posting was skipped-due mostly to travel-were made up as soon as possible, usually by putting up two photos a day until all was fixed. The project soon came to be more important than my earlier site and within a year I launched Visiblerepublic.com with a design I'd reverse-engineered from stuff I liked elsewhere. Over time an index appeared; a chronologic one first, and then attempts at separating certain subjects. Links to other, more editorial, work of mine have been added and removed. Hidden in plain sight are outside links to the work of others I find especially simpatico. What you won't find is any written explanation of the pictures. But five years is a long, for us, period of time, and five-years' work of sequential pictures is a lot, worth at least a rhetorical pedestal. What's here is my life, photographed for the most part obliquely, incidental details of what was really going on with and around me. On the other hand, many pictures, though it may be hard to tell which ones, are very direct. There is also no shortage of artistic whimwhams of mine on display. It's an edit and so a narrative; one that has a surprising thematic satisfaction for me; achieved, maybe, by something greater than style. Since I am the only person with the full story here, visitors are also spared the vertiginous feeling I now get too often of landing, sometimes at random, back in a certain place on a certain day. They are free to skip though a field where I will always stumble on snares and pools. For the first two years, I used the wonderful Olympus C2020 digital camera (superseded in model and design, but hardly improved on), gradually supplemented after that by the very handy, if less optically distinguished, Canon S330. That now is the only camera I use, though I plan on getting another, fairly inexpensive one soon.

Chicago December 6, 2005
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