Week of Life project, www.weekoflife.com: Interesting photo story format

“Week of Life is a documentary site to which anyone can contribute that aims to create the world’s largest photo library about life around us. People from all around the world can contribute with weeks of their life, seven days captured in nine photographs for each day. Sixty-three photographs that make up a small documentary about one’s life that then become part of a large documentary about the world.”  The Czech photographer, Adolf Zika, came up with the idea of the usefulness of the 7 x 9 images week after creating a year’s worth of these images using the 9 image day.

I like the idea, but looking through the site of images shows that it takes a lot of work to get the 63 images to tell a story.  If one has the time and inclination, this is an interesting format.

Each of the user week long vignettes or stories are posted and to some degree tells a story especially to its creator or someone who has shared the experience or is interesting in exercising their imagination. The site of 9 x 7 posted images of their week has 165 common keywords from adrenalin to work, 45 locations and 31 people.

Zika’s 2006 55 MByte book of 3285 (9 x 365) can also be download is less interesting than the 9 image day idea. It is more like what you might expect to see by pulling 3000 photos from your own e-Memory or better yet those from a professional photographer on vatactio.  The experiment of Zika to recall a particular day with 85% accuracy after two years is not unexpected when you have nine images to recall something about a day.  Zika’s book is not unlike Rick Smollen’s “A day in the life of x” that he and thousands of photographers have created.