Six Years of Daily Self Portraits… With the Lens Cap On

Here’s a photo project so profound that it might make you weep (you might also cry for other reasons). Artist Will Vincent has a project titled “Two Thousand, One Hundred and Ninety One.” His artist statement is a single sentence: “Every day for six years I took a photo of myself with the lense cap on.”

Here’s a selection of some of the better photographs in the series:

So basically, Vincent is like Noah Kalina meets John Cage.

Photographer Noah Kalina’s Everyday project features a single self-portrait taken every day for the past 12 years.

American composer and music theorist John Cage is most famous for his 1952 piece, 4′33″. Here’s a performance of that piece (this video has nearly 3 million views on YouTube, and plenty of “dislikes.”):

Vincent has some other things to say about Two Thousand, One Hundred and Ninety One:

An extended visual musing on: The fleetingness of existence. The sheer futility of human endeavour. The extent to which internet meme culture pervades modern life. Being a forgetful bastard.

Making: One camera, one tripod, one man.

Thankfully, all the “photographs” on Vincent’s website are copies of a single GIF image, meaning this isn’t a project he literally carried out. That would have been… depressing.


Update: Wikipedia has an entire list of songs that consist mostly or entirely of silence.


Image credits: Photographs by Will Vincent

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