Pointing at Joy: 20 Years of The Daily Nice by Jason Evans

By Carri Munden

Jason Evans has been producing his eclectic images at the boundaries of fashion, music and street photography since the early 1990s. His photographs and assemblage are exhibited internationally, and his seminal series Strictly is held in the permanent collection of the Tate Gallery.

In 2004, Evans launched The Daily Nice, a website where he posts a photograph of something that's made him happy in a deliberate gesture to highlight the good and the joyful, with the belief that positive will bring positive. The image remains for 24 hours and is then replaced, with no online archive.

To celebrate its 20th anniversary, we’ve created five limited-edition sets of playing cards, each featuring 52 unique images from Evans' archive of the project. Ahead of the release, legendary designer, stylist and fellow East Kent expat Carri Munden sat down with Evans to discuss The Daily Nice, and the part it has played in Evans’ practice over the last twenty years.

"I love that after years of friends or mutual connections trying to arrange a meeting or working collaboration in London, that Jason and I met organically by both moving to the Thanet coast." Munden says, "I think we both made it home for very similar reasons. Although we still have not worked together, I enjoy the creative collaboration that is our friendship. I have learnt things about myself through friendship with Jason, and I value the inspiration but also his kindness, honesty and protection."

Jason Evans: Hey Carri! I am really glad you were able to fit this in, as our trust and understanding of one another, and the contexts we’ve worked in bodes well for our chat. That’s unusual in these circumstances, a treat.

CM: Clicking through these The Daily Nice images is pure JOY. They are the Everyday elevated. A visual diary with recurring visual forms. I imagine this repetition is unconscious. It feels very pure, a visual stream of consciousness. But are these images also about personal memories and emotions or moments? Or is it purely about the image?

JE: The audience was only ever supposed to see one picture at a time, a bunch of the images can feel like a potentially overwhelming carnival of eye candy, which you were subjected to for the purposes of this conversation. The Daily Nice pictures are the outcome of my compulsively ‘pointing’ at things that give me visual pleasure, and wanting to share that as positive affirmation. The repetition of subject matter or motif was unconscious, but over 20 years it has revealed my obsessions back to me, made me more self aware as a creative. I see that I am more consistent than I realised, which in turn gave me licence to go off piste. Some days I’m more oblique than others with a definition of ‘nice’ just to have fun with my audience.

CM: That is so special to be able to look back and learn something about yourself and your practise from these spontaneous moments. And there are a lot of circles. I use a lot of circles in my graphic design work – a circle is such a pure and pleasing form. It is organic / ancient / sci fi / pagan / powerful / calm. Would you agree?

JE: I know, right!? I don’t know what it is with me and circles, and stripes for that matter. I generally avoid triangles. Circles are definitely a calm thing for me. In ocular or photographic terms the circular is resonant. No Sun, arguably our biggest circle, no light. No light, no photography. And our eyeballs, plus our pupils are round, as are the lenses in our cameras. Our planet and on and on… I’m being a bit loosey-goosey here but I think you get where I’m coming from.

CM: Post covid lockdowns I had social anxiety for the first time in my life. When I left the house, especially on my first trip back to London, I found myself instinctively counting squares and breaking every street view down to its simple geometric forms.This meant I could ignore the humans, the crowds, the threat. A kind of visual disassociation, self-regulation I guess. Is The Daily Nice a form of visual Therapy?

JE: Totally! I too experience social anxiety, in cities anyway, and when I started making pictures, typically in the street, out and about, the camera acted like a bit of a shield, but also kind of gave me permission to go off and satisfy my curiosity and wanderlust. Photography helped me bridge the gap between where I was and where I could find myself, physically and mentally. Later on I got into the idea of photo-therapy from reading Jo Spence’s ‘Putting Myself in the Picture.’ I’ve had this ongoing push-pull with depression through my life, and having the daily nice program of photographing stuff that made me happy has set a positive agenda to my looking, and in turn to my being out in the world.

CM: I love that it has become such a positive daily practise. I really believe humans need ritual. It is powerful.

As you said, each image only exists online for one day, why did you decide this? And how does it feel now seeing them all together as a collection?

JE: I don’t keep an archive or a record of the images, I’ve lost loads of them on old laptops, but I don’t mind, there’s always going to be more beauty, more inspiration, you just have to be tuned into it. That’s what the no archive policy implies, letting go is a radical act in a consumer culture. It’s about the process, the taking part, not accumulation.

I made an hour-long slide show of ‘nices’ with a soundtrack of ‘nice’ musics, like twinkly ambient and new age stuff, for the Bound Art Book Fair online edition, just to see what it felt like. I called it “too much of a good thing”. Seeing them all together makes me happy, and I was glad to hear you describe it as joyful. So much documentary photography is depressing, or depicts ‘difficult’ subject matter, which serves to reinforce the nervous narratives that keep people anxious. In balance, I need to believe that despite everything there is also hope and beauty. Agnes Martin said ‘beauty is the mystery of life’ and I believe her.

CM: Humans feature randomly and rarely in the The Daily Nice but there is always humour and play and signs of humans. Your portraits and Fashion editorials are the first I knew of your work and are always honest and magic. What attracts you to someone, makes you want to photograph them?

JE: Woah, good question. I am not sure exactly why but sometimes I’m just drawn to a person, not because of how they look, but maybe how they move or carry themselves. How they make me feel. That feeling can be so strong that I overcome social anxiety and go up to them and ask for a picture. In the 90s I used to do street casting for other photographers, and would have to interpret what their requirements were and it got  complicated, really interesting, like a creative social experiment.

CM: The Daily Nice is all about colour, texture, light, patterns and layers of all of these. They are snapshots, unintentional but perfect compositions. The result is sometimes very similar to your artworks made from collage. Do The Daily Nice images ever inspire other later more complex works?

JE: Typically my compositions simply place the visual pleasure in the centre of the frame, and are shot without looking at the screen, point and press. I generally photograph things as I first encounter them. The ‘snapshot’ aesthetic is approachable and signals informality. About 10 years ago I noticed that I was unconsciously playing more with the frame and the subject, the compositions became more deliberate. That coincided with how my other work had become more considered and self aware. I guess that has to do with age and experience and an ongoing exploration of the medium. The things that inspire me in the world have a definite impact on my other making, commissioned and personal. It’s a dialogue.

CM: This collection of images is incredibly personal but also accessible to anyone. Is this important to you? Do you want to talk about the work you do with SEN youth and adults?

JE: Accessibility is important to me, it’s part of why I do so little gallery work, and why I was initially drawn to magazines in the 80s. Having had the life experience of feeling othered, for my queerness and my neurotype, the idea of access became an important drive and led me to community work. Photography for me is an outward facing medium and it’s led me to think about who gets access, and to what, and how that can be broadened. That led to some useful personal development through working with marginalised groups including adults with learning disabilities, recovering addicts, immigrants and the children of refugees. It sounds altruistic, yet I get so much back from it. Those glorious, unselfconscious outcomes of the untrained eye in action reminds me that I can unlearn held beliefs about my process in order to develop.

CM: I absolutely agree I have done a lot of youth and outreach work and it's always a symbiotic experience. I have learnt so much about myself.

The Daily Nice started in 2004 pre-Instagram but the insta “photo dump” with a carefully considered post of memories and still life images is now iconic. I am interested in how Instagram as the first primarily image based social media platform has influenced visual aesthetics. I have a private IG as well as my main and when I first made it in 2013 I had no followers to start with and would post abstract but meaningful images from my day. The abstract narrative created from these posts means so much to me and probably only to me. What is your relationship with social media / instagram? How important was it to you that The Daily Nice was online? And to connect with others?

JE: I wanted to do an online project in 2004 because the internet was there, remember I’d spent like the first 30 years of my life in an offline world. I was curious. It gave me this comparatively cheap access to a potentially international audience. It felt like a no-brainer, the costs and constraints of a gallery show, that might only be seen by a couple of hundred local people, were prohibitive. Pocket digital cameras had become feasible too. I didn’t feel wedded to making physical stuff, there’s enough of that in the world already, and had always preferred the page to the wall. I optimistically thought the internet was going to be like the best library ever, and this was an opportunity to self publish there. Photography online felt like an exciting new frontier then… Now look at us!

Like everyone I struggle with Instagram’s addictive modus operandi and think it’s contributed to a photo-weariness in me. I don’t use a smartphone, I think they are sinister, even though the imaging tech is wild. I’ve stuck with Sony Cybershots for 20 years, the colours are great and the image quality doesn’t feel phone-y.

CM: Your work feels analogue even when shot or altered digitally. What is your relationship to digital technology as a whole?

JE: Technology is mostly inert, it’s just that it ends up in the hands of greedy idiots, guns don’t fire themselves. My practice is hybrid. I’m an either/and, not an either/or person. Sometimes I need the emo-texture that, say, screen print or Riso can give for a project. If I’m going to print or post I have to submit digital files, there’s no escaping that. I do hardly any post production, I just aim to get it right in the studio. I love happy accidents, that’s how we learn. Own a ‘mistake’ and it becomes your technique. Believe it or not, some clients afford me these parameters and trust my judgement. I’m just not a fix-it-in-post kinda guy.

CM: And why cards not a book? Especially cards you cannot potentially play with more than once. Is this intentionally subverting their use?

JE: I like applied photography, and I like playing cards as a format, they are a bit like t-shirts or record sleeves or badges or postcards, analogue holders for images. I love those Eames cards too, and wanted something that felt a bit like that. People often describe my work as playful, I’m serious about having fun I guess. Fun is a very special form of creative glue. If people want to memorise which image is on which card and cheat, well that’s just their problem. At the end of the day cheats are just playing themselves, and there’s no fun in that.

Carri Munden is Designer and founder of CassettePlaya. Cassette Playa was an independent lifestyle brand with a global reputation for cult graphics, progressive menswear, digital print and new technologies. Founded in 2006, Cassette Playa showed at London Fashion Week for 12 seasons, 8 of which were digital presentations. Cassette Playa used film, animation, soundscapes, augmented reality and interactive digital installations, to push the boundaries of Fashion presentation beyond catwalk. Carri is also a freelance Designer, Creative Director, Stylist and lecturer. Originally born in Kent she moved from London to Margate in 2019.

The Daily Nice playing cards are available to purchase from our shop here.