Daily Portraits

Martin Pavel brought his Daily Portrait project to Berlin. The concept’s straightforward: you photograph someone naked, they photograph you, you photograph the next person. Daily photographs, published daily, for a year straight.

The math gets funny if you think about it - Berlin has three and a half million people, and one portrait a day would take ten thousand years to photograph everyone. That’s not the point. The point is the daily ritual. Show up, stand there, let someone photograph you without clothes on. Next day, you’re the photographer.

There’s something about that kind of daily work that strips away pretense. You can’t hide behind concept or technique when you’re repeating the same simple gesture every single day. The commitment itself becomes the work.

Pavel started this series in Prague years ago. This is the fourth edition. The Berlin version runs for a year. If you know someone in the chain or want to join, you can apparently reach out to him. Some of the participants might be familiar. Probably most aren’t.

It’s the kind of project that probably shouldn’t work - too vulnerable, too simple, too dependent on people actually showing up day after day. But maybe that’s exactly why it works.