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PEOPLE & ARTS Saturday 25 February 2017
Professor has taken a selfie every day for the past 30 years

PHILIP MARCELO main faithful to that first image, posing
Associated Press with the same neutral facial expression
BOSTON (AP) — Long be- and using the same 35mm camera, tri-
fore they were called self- pod, backdrop and lighting.
ies, Karl Baden snapped “The act itself is like brushing your
a simple black and white teeth,” he said. “I’ll just take the picture
photo of himself. Then he and get on with the rest of my day. It’s
repeated it every day for not a holy ritual or anything.”
the next three decades. Baden has taken other pains to main-
Baden’s “Every Day” proj- tain the same aesthetic. He has con-
ect officially turns 30 on sciously not grown a beard or mus-
Thursday and he says he tache, and his hair remains simply
has no intention of stop- styled.
ping. The stark contempla- “I have to turn all these variables into
tion on mortality and aging constants so that I’m not distracting
has prompted some to dub from the aging process,” Baden ex-
the Boston College profes- plained.
sor the unwitting “father of Besides mortality, Baden says the proj-
the selfie.” ect touches on the notions of obses-
The 64-year-old Cam- sion, incremental change and perfec-
bridge resident grumbles tion. “As much as I try to make every
at comparisons to the picture the same, I fail every day,” he
pouty face, self-congratu- said. “There’s always something that’s
latory portraits that now fill a little different, aside from the aging
Instagram and Facebook. process.”
But he recognizes the ubiq- Approaching 11,000 photos, the
uity of the selfie has helped changes in Baden’s appearance over
raise the profile of the proj- time don’t appear dramatic. But in
ect, which has been ex- 2001, Baden underwent chemother-
hibited in art galleries in apy to treat prostate cancer and be-
Boston, New York City and came noticeably thinner.
elsewhere over the years. The cancer is now in remission and,
“If it wasn’t for the selfie as later pictures show, Baden quick-
craze, I’d probably be ly bounced back. The only lasting
slogging along in anonym- change from that time, he says, has This panel of black and white self-made photographs provided by Karl Baden
ity as usual,” Baden joked been his eyebrows; they never quite shows Baden over the last three decades beginning Feb. 23, 1987, top left, through
this week. “Which is sort of grew back.q Feb. 21, 2017, lower right.
what I had expected.” Associated Press
What makes the project
work is that it reflects a num-
ber of universal themes,
from death to man’s ob-
session with immortalizing
himself in some way, said
Howard Yezerski, a Boston
gallery owner who has ex-
hibited the project on two
occasions.
“It’s both personal and uni-
versal at the same time,”
he said. “He’s recording a
life, or at least one aspect
of it that we can all relate
to because we’re all in
same boat. We’re all go-
ing to die.”
Robert Mann, a New York
City gallery owner that ex-
hibited Baden’s work on
its 10th anniversary, says
he’s impressed with how
Baden has stuck to his pro-
cess. “Watching Karl age
(gracefully) in front of the
camera has been an hon-
or,” he said.
Baden quietly launched his
project on Feb. 23, 1987,
the day after Andy Warhol
died and nearly two de-
cades before Facebook
emerged. He tries to re-