Since mid-summer 2018, I lived across the Charles River and crossed the John W. Weeks Footbridge almost every day to reach Harvard’s main campus. At some point — I can’t recall exactly when — I began to pause at the footbridge’s center line, photographing the bridge beside it, which I later learned was the Anderson Memorial Bridge.
Until the pandemic, when I moved away, I took more than two hundred images from this fixed vantage point, each preserving a fragment of light, weather, and season. Together they form a quiet chronicle of a place both constant and ever-changing.
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“We must institute a library in which we must collect everything we possess relating to the customs of everyday life.” —Leon Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life
2020 brought many people’s deepest fears into reality.
There was unemployment, bankruptcies, mental collapse, illness, death, and—for many ordinary people still living—the endless dullness of domestic everyday life.
The Russian term for this habitual, tedious everyday life is byt, a word usually translated into English as “everyday life” or “mode of life,” but once declared by Roman Jakobson “culturally untranslatable” into Western languages.
Writer Anya von Bremzen interprets byt as “the metaphysical weight of the daily grind, the existentially depleting cares of material living.”
Scholar Christina Kiaer explains byt as “the everyday life in its most mundane and material aspects, as opposed to higher forms of spiritual or philosophical existence.”
According to Svetlana Boym, at least since the nineteenth century byt has been seen by many as a “fundamental feature of [Russian] culture,” signifying “everyday routine and stagnation,” as opposed to bytie, which refers to spiritual being—the “real” life found elsewhere.
Russian avant‑garde artists’ contemplations on byt, on different ways of changing it, and particularly Dziga Vertov’s call for “a precise study of movement” and for reorganizing the movements of everyday objects “as a rhythmical whole” according to their “internal rhythm,” inspired me to create my own project The Rhythm of Byt.
The short film consists of three parts.
While they share the themes of time, domesticity, and everyday life, each part is edited according to a different type of rhythm.
For a full “Director’s Note,” see here.
Couple Couple is an app that applies game theory to help partners explore strategies for navigating decisions together.