ADITL by Keri G. '10

Yesterday I carried my camera around all day and took awkward pictures of my friends.

(Hi, Sam.)

What made this different from all the other days when I carry my camera around all day and take awkward pictures of my friends and everything around me is that hundreds of other people on campus were doing the same thing with the same purpose: to take part in A Day In The Life, a project open to the entire MIT community sponsored by Technique, MIT’s yearbook and photography club. Students, faculty, and staff alike have been uploading their photos to the website, which Technique describes as a “collective photo blog” and which allows you to view timelines of multiple people’s photos at once.

Over 120 people have collectively uploaded thousands of pictures of their days so far, and it’s really interesting to see not just what people do over the course of a typical day, but also how they choose to frame that. The project made me notice the things around me all the time that I never really stopped to look at.

Like eating lunch in Stata, where seats fill up around noon and everyone moves quickly all the time.

Or the pattern of the splatter paint on the walls of my room, which I stopped noticing about two weeks after I did it.

It also gave me the opportunity to take a million pictures of the disastrous construction zone all the way down Amherst Street to the corner of Ames and Amherst (also known as WHERE I LIVE. RAWR.), because my parents do not believe me when I tell them how ridiculous it looks. The stairs to Senior House were cordoned off for over a month. Everyone was using the handicapped ramp. Delivery guys and taxi drivers keep trying to turn the wrong way down what was once a two-way street and not understanding why pedestrians and the drivers of oncoming cars keep giving them the finger.

Anyway, Check out ADITL. It’s made of awesome.