Morning Series - David Wolf

20 years in 20 seconds (with somewhat slower summary). Music by @midisyncbro (Chris Dixon (@lapracticadefamilia).

I’ve taken a self-portrait almost every morning since 2001. I started the project after almost failing some 9AM classes in college, simply because I couldn’t get my lazy ass out of bed in time. I figured photography was a good enough reason to get myself up though. So the basic premise was hit the snooze button, then try to beat it by taking a photo within 10 minutes. I needed a subject to tie all these images together. In college you never knew how the night would unfold and where you’d end up and I wasn’t willing to cart around a Morandi bottle or Dreher water glass. Inevitably I turned the camera on the most available subject: myself. I adopted some guiding principles early on to keep me honest: take the picture within the first 10 minutes of the day (no make-ups if I slept through my alarm), no pre-planning the image, one frame only, some part of my body in the frame (a Freidlander shadow is not sufficient for this particular project), keep it analog to create a buffer between taking the image and seeing the results, curb my ego, experiment and have fun. The project was never meant to be a timelapse, but I definitely learned some things putting this animation together.

To celebrate the 20yr anniversary of the Morning Series, I selected a film strip from each year and posted it to Instagram (@wolfdavidwolf), where I explained more about why I chose each strip and the lessons learned over the years.