ten:15.

The web has allowed a whole new medium of collaborative photography to flourish. Artists teaming together is obviously nothing new, but the ease and instance of the interwebs make it totally free-flow for strangers around the world to shed their own little bit of creative light together onto one project.

I’ve noticed that lots of these collabs have found a way to focus on something universal and immutable: time. Our locations and cultures and languages are all different, but it’s always going to be 10:15 am everywhere and that’s not changing anytime soon. Similar to Craig Geffen’s awesome Humanclock, which collects photos from around the world visualizing every minute of every day, ten:15 wants you to send in a picture of whatever you happen to be doing at 10:15 am no matter where you are in the world.

There’s something about the communal collection of our banalities that make them become completely fascinating. Having photographic proof that some dude in Manila is putting cream in his morning coffee somehow creates a little more balance and order in the universe. While I was there, I noticed that a frequent collaborator to ten:15 is Michael Surtees, the man behind the lovely “New York City Colour Project”.

Uploaders can create their own user portfolio and the site and link it back to their personal site, making it a great way to search for new photographers or just to voyeuristically photo-creep on other people’s lives. You can search the archives by photographer, date, or location. There’s something about the casual nature of the photographs, that sort of laid back moment where someone picked up their camera or phone at 10:15 and just snapped, that creates some really beautiful shots – with an inherent spontaneity that can’t really be faked:

David Y. Lee – Brooklyn, NY

Verna Pitts – Minnesota

Barry Choi – Toronto

Jody Sugrue – Toronto

Here’s my first submission, sent in today. It’s my bonsai tree, Mr. Miyagi…

Via Gerry Mak @ Lost At E Minor

craig geffen: humancalendar.com + humanclock.com.

I wish I’d found out about this on, oh… say January 1st, but I’m only about two months late.

The latest in Craig Geffen’s duo of photographic time-keeping sites, the inspirations for Humancalendar.com came to him while riding his bicycle around Australis and wondering about the re-design for his already existing site, Humanclock.com.

His Brady-esque take on the calendar was completely conceptualized and coded by Geffen himself. Everyone in the 3,992 pictures (and I shudder to think about how he would have had to keep them all organized, facing the right angles, to make this thing work…) are all friends of his. I go there every day – almost not so much to see what day it is (I already know that) but more just to see if he ever fucks it up. He never does.

Humanclock is the site that started it all. Created in 2001, you just pick your timezone and the site shows you a photo representing the time. The pic changes each minute, and each minute has several photos sent in from all around the world. Here’s the one I got, sent from Tel Aviv, at the minute I started writing this post. Clearly, it’s fate, and I’m a big fan of anything involving what appears to be some kind of Tropical Skittle (or the Israeli version, at any rate):

Humanclock gets really addictive really fast, and the inventiveness of the photos never gets old. Price tags, license plates, people lying in the middle of the road – you never know what you’re gonna’ get. Similar to other personalized user-contributed photo sites (like the amazing You Are Beautiful), there’s something about the easy straight-forwardness of all this that I really enjoy. We’re dealing with some pretty quantified concepts here, and yet they seem so organic and happy on his sites.