210
210
210
A personal habit, catalogued.

The 210 Archive
by
JP Coakley

The 210 Archive gathers a single number, photographed wherever it appeared — on scales and price tags, road signs and rulers, screens and street corners.


The rule

One number, kept track of
for twenty-three years.


The rule is simple. If the number 210 turns up in front of me, I take a picture of it.

It has turned up on a bathroom scale in Patagonia and a hotel door in Ningbo, on subtitles and speedometers, in a price, a room number, a bus route, a countdown. It has been photographed on 35 mm film, on a point & shoot, on a DSLR, on five or six phones, and — more and more — as a screenshot of something on a screen.

Nothing here is staged and nothing is searched for. That is the whole point: the archive is a record of attention, not of effort. What it actually measures is where I was, what I was looking at, and what I was carrying a camera in.


The ledger

Every sighting, in order.


Captured on
Kind
Era
Search

The findings

What twenty-three years
of one number looks like.


Sightings by year

Lean years are travel years spent without a camera in hand, or years I simply stopped noticing.

What I was carrying

Each dot is one sighting, placed on the year it happened. The archive doubles as a record of consumer camera history.

The keywords

The longest droughts

BetweenDays

Where it happened

Every sighting with coordinates, plotted on a bare latitude & longitude grid. No coastlines — just the shape of a life.

Countries

CountrySightings

Cities

CitySightings