365 Days is symptomatic of Bakker’s serendipitous approach to image making – a collection of 365 postcard images, one for each day of a year, which were exhibited online, in his home and in book form.

Bakker set out to create a visual diary of his life in London and beyond. By midnight of each day, he selected the photograph of the day which was filed with the relevant factual information: the date, time, location and postcode.

Sarah Kent writes in her introductory essay Close Encounters in the book of 365 Days: 'Roelof Bakker is not attempting some kind of philosophical resume, yet no matter whether you believe that your encounters and your very life are gifts from God, or merely the result of happenstance, 365 Days encourages you to ponder those moments that you didn't record and didn't even bother to experience fully...365 Days presents life as a series of fortuitous happenings – as beautiful as the chance encounter of a photographer and a broken umbrella in a London square – images, that seen together acquire an almost surreal intensity.'
See box below to read the essay.

Time Out Arts Critics' Choice April 26-May 3 2006: '365 Days represented through 365 photographs - from reindeer antlers abandoned in Soho through a broken umbrella in Trafalgar Square to Alison Lapper on her plinth – Bakker's celebration of life in London is a delight.'

Close Encounters

Introductory essay to 365 Days, published 2007

By mid-January most people have forgotten the New Year’s resolutions they made in the hope of improving some aspect of life in the year ahead, but Roelof Bakker persisted all the way through 2005. His plan was to take one or more photographs every day of the year so as to create a visual record of his life in London. ‘Some days I’d take hundreds of pictures’, he says, ‘but sometimes I didn’t feel like taking any, so I’d come home at midnight and take a picture of the light fitting!’

Oddly enough, mundane shots such as a bowl of fruit on a flowery blue tablecloth, the light fitting in the bedroom of his north London flat or a mound of hair clippings in the bathroom sink are among the most memorable images, because they are the most personal. Anyone can take quirky pictures of things randomly spotted in the street, but these more intimate subjects offer a sense of both the particularity and the ordinariness of daily life. ‘By midnight I’d have chosen a picture to represent the day,’ Bakker explains. ‘I chose the one that meant most to me, rather than the one that summed up the day. The result is like a diary and, for me, looking at it is like reliving the year; I remember what was going on during the rest of that day. I don’t normally like living in the past, but it’s an interesting way to get to know yourself better.’
He used a digital camera that recorded the date and time each picture was taken and thereby precluded the possibility of fudging things. ‘The whole project would have been ruined if I’d tried to fake it and, anyway, I couldn’t have done it with a normal camera. I’d have spent all my time developing and printing the film, whereas on a digital camera its easy to edit. It made me notice things in a different way; you might find yourself lying on the pavement, for instance, to see things from a different angle.’

The worm’s-eye view of an ice cream dropped on the pavement in Rosebery Gardens where Bakker lives, must have involved grovelling in the gutter. This mock-heroic image invites you to imagine the scene – a distraught child howling all the way home while a madman pulls focus on his abandoned cone. Perfect timing like this makes one wonder, though, if any of the pictures were posed. ‘Afew of them were set up,’ Bakker confesses. ‘The one of me lying on the hall floor as if I were dead is obviously premeditated. I didn’t think I would take pictures of myself; its quite narcissistic.’ There are a surprising number of shots of himself, his lover and friends; for me, these are the least interesting pictures, because they are the most expected and also because the genre has become something of a cliché thanks to the thousands of snaps taken every day on mobile phones.

Other, less obvious choices give the diary more individuality. Having moved here from Holland twenty three years ago, Bakker studied typographic design at the London College of Printing (now the London College of Communication) and signs, especially humorous ones, frequently catch his eye. Anews poster reads: ‘Relief as village toilets are saved’; ‘God’ is written with sheets of corrugated iron in Abney Park cemetery; a sticker warning of antisocial behaviour has been vandalised; the figure on a roadworks sign has been embellished with wings and a dangling prick; chalked on the board in a pub called The Perseverance, is the message: ‘I travelled the world searching for peace of mind then returned home and found it.’

Bakker has an eye for composition and most of the unashamedly beautiful pictures were taken in his flat, perhaps as an inadvertent celebration of home. Acut glass decanter and tumblers stand on the living room windowsill; it is April and outside is a tree laden with white blossom. Clear packets of lemon, rose hip and orange tea are stacked on a kitchen shelf; offset by the crimson wall, the bands of saturated colour create a brilliant abstract design. Several shots of clothing – white socks drying on a white radiator, sheets piled in the hallway and jeans dropped on the bedroom floor – wander into territory made familiar by Wolfgang Tillmans; but one of them is truly surreal. Apair of jeans sits on a bedroom chair as though filled by an invisible body while, on the carpet beneath, two discarded socks lie where the feet should be. Its possible that this picture was set up, but a similarly evocative shot taken on a train in Amsterdam must surely have been spontaneous. Across the gangway, a vacant seat is apparently filled by the reflection of the boy sitting opposite; a trick of the light has produced a phantom passenger, an ephemeral being made tangible by Bakker’s lens.

Chance encounters of this kind may feel like gifts, but a keen eye and a trigger happy finger are necessary if one is to capture them and other magical moments – such as the Thames bathed in the golden glow of an August evening, a soggy parking fine tucked under the wipers of a wet windscreen, and two snails peering over the edge of a wall as if planning a descent. There’s also pathos; an umbrella lies crumpled in Trafalgar Square; a toy rat dangles by its tail from a letter box and red antlers lie discarded on a Soho pavement. Garlands of plastic flowers frame the window of a pedal cycle and a tarpaulin covers the seat; is that a body slumped beneath the cloth?

On the rare occasions when Bakker strives to achieve interesting effects, though, the results seem self-conscious. He lies on the floor, his head reflected in a shard of mirror. The image is as spatially complex as a collage and, in other circumstances, it would be impressive but, in this context, it feels contrived. The diary format seems to impose on him the role of flâneur or observer, responding to whatever life throws in his path, rather than of creator imposing his will on things. And, by default, this gradually assumes the authority of a philosophical proposition. 365 Days presents life as a series of fortuitous happenings – as beautiful as the chance encounter of a photographer and a broken umbrella in a London square (1) – recorded in images that, seen together, acquire an almost surreal intensity.

In these pages, public and private realms usually remain distinct; occasionally, though, they mirror one another. Afox sunbathes in Bakker’s garden while, stencilled on the wall of the Nat West bank, possibly by Banksy, an imaginary fox trots along the high street. Sometimes history intrudes; on July 7th, the television brings news of suicide bombers into the bedroom with a picture of a police cordon and the strap line ‘London Bombings’. Next day Bakker celebrates the fact that he is alive by recording his wet footprints on the bath mat. Adead wasp on the window sill and a shrivelled apple resembling a brain encourage further contemplation of death and the miracle of being alive.

Transferred onto video, the images are incredibly seductive. Flashing by in 365 seconds, this summary of a year leaves you desperate for extra time so that you can savour the more beautiful, humorous or unexpected images and consider the meaning of it all. Its an apt metaphor for life itself; as you get older things seem to speed up and, as time slips away, you wish you could press the pause button to relish the good moments or rewind the tape to erase the bad ones.

To a certain extent, this book satisfies that desire. Bakker was forty one when the diary was made; could it have been his way of confronting a mid-life crisis? ‘It was more like a mid-life affirmation’, he says. ‘I’ve always been obsessive about looking at things around me and I’m lucky to live in a city that gives me so much energy. The project reinvigorated me and I hope it inspires other people.’

The last image is of a message written in a guest book on New Year’s Eve; it reads ‘The purpose of life is to be happy. So be happy.’ Roelof Bakker is not attempting some kind of philosophical resumé – he is not emulating Proust, after all – yet no matter whether you believe that your encounters and your very life are gifts from God, or merely the result of happenstance, 365 Days encourages you to ponder those moments that you didn’t record and didn’t even bother to experience fully.

(1) Written by Comte de Lautréamont in 1869, the original comment ‘as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table’ was adopted by the Surrealists as a benchmark of the uncanny.

Sarah Kent
Sarah Kent is an art writer and critic