TED Blog » Steven Addis

A father and daughter talk about their photo tradition, 15 years in the making

Kate Torgovnick — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 21:30:07 +0000

In his TED Talk, Steven Addis shared a tradition that he and has daughter have kept for 15 years, since she was just a year old. On a father-daughter trip to New York City, the pair asks a stranger to snap a photo of them on the exact same street corner. Addis calls these photos his 15 most treasured images.

Steven Addis: A father-daughter bond, one photo at a timeYesterday, Addis and his daughter appeared on CBS News to share more about their tradition. Sabina Addis, now 16-years-old, spoke about the ritual from her perspective.

“I think it’s a really special trip. New York really laid down the foundation of the relationship my dad and I have together. We have a level of trust and comfort together that I can’t image many 16-year-olds have with their fathers,” she says. “For me, it’s really cool just to see how we’ve both grown and how different I look every single year. Each one triggers back a memory of each specific trip. It queues up a lot of memories.”

When asked how long they plan to continue this tradition, Steven Addis says, “Now it’s sacred … The plan is for the rest of, probably, my life.”

Six great moments in time-lapse photography

Jessica Gross — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 16:16:37 +0000

Years ago, Steven Addis’s wife photographed him holding their 1-year-old daughter on the corner of 57 Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City. On her second birthday, the family happened to be back in the city, so headed to the same corner for daddy-daughter photo, round two. The next year, Addis brought his daughter back to New York — on purpose, this time — to take the same photograph.

This annual ritual is now 15 years strong. And in today’s talk, filmed at TED2012, Addis shares his “15 most treasured photos,” all but the first two snapped by strangers he handed his camera to. The most recent image drew big laughs from the TED audience, as Addis is holding his now-teenaged daughter in his arms. She appears to be nearly his height.

“These photos are far more than proxies for a single moment or even a specific trip,” Addis says. “They are also ways for us to freeze time for one week in October and reflect on time and how we change from year to year—and not just physically, but in every way. Because while we take the same photo, our perspectives change.”

Addis’s hope in sharing this metamorphosis through photographs is to encourage others to take “an active role in consciously creating memories.”

To see Addis’ father-daughter photo series, watch his moving talk. And below, a look at others who are realizing the power of the same image repeated over time in impressive, funny and meaningful time-lapse projects.

1. When he turned 30, Cesar Kuriyama decided to start filming one second every single day. The cut-together snippets show adventure, boredom, illness, nature, coffee, computers — that is, life, alternately exciting and mundane. Kuriyama gave the talk “Filming one second every day” at TED2012 about this now lifelong project.

Recently, Kuriyama has been working on a 1 Second Everyday App. This month, he took to Kickstarter to fund it. With over a week to go, the project already has twice the amount Kuriyama needed to get the app off the ground. Read the TED Blog’s Q&A with Kuriyama about why he decided to create the app, so others could film their lives too.

2. In a similar (and similarly beautiful) project, Dutch filmmaker and artist Frans Hofmeester filmed his daughter, Lotte, every day from birth to age 12. They do grow up fast—in under three minutes, in this case.

3. Last week, the New York Times’s Op-Docs team put out a video chronicling a day in the life of a piano on a street in New York City’s Washington Heights. This short film, by Anthony Sherin, has a gripping narrative arc—and inspires an unusual degree of empathy toward the piano, a.k.a. an inanimate object. (Spoiler: get out some tissues.)

4. And now for something completely different: this exuberant video of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, is not just another cityscape time-lapse, argues Mashable: it “may just take the genre to a whole new level,” using “quick cuts, neck-twisting camera angles and a pumped up soundtrack to mesmerizing effect.” You may be inspired to visit, or at least to go party at a nightclub.

5. Still have that box of tissues handy? This video of the Milky Way, shot during May evenings in South Dakota, is the kind of majestic footage that makes you reflect on your place in the world. The videographer, Randy Halverson, has made a number of other time-lapse videos as well.

6. For the past 30 years, a family in China has held a photo ritual that is strikingly similar to Addis’. On Father’s Day, 31-year-old daughter Zhao Meng Meng posted on Weibo images of herself with her father, one taken every of year of her life. The amazing images quickly went viral.

Growing, changing from year to year: Steven Addis at TED2012

Helen Walters — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 01:03:33 +0000

Marketing and brand strategist Steven Addis turns up to show the 15 most treasured photographs in his collection. But these are not the highly produced shots you might expect from one who works in visual communications. Instead, they are the father-daughter snapshots he started as a unwitting project when his child was born. Every year on the same day he heads to the same intersection in New York to ask a stranger to shoot a portrait of him holding his daughter. The series is both funny (at 15, she’s pretty tall now) and moving, while the project, he says, is a cherished, anticipated time. It’s a “way for us to freeze time for one week in October, and to reflect on our times and how we change from year to year, not just physically but in every way.” Touching.