Digital Diaries

Digital Diaries, published by Taschen in 2000, is Natacha Merritt's collection of explicit self-portraits and portraits made on an early consumer digital camera. It was one of the first photobooks built entirely from digital files rather than film negatives.

Merritt began photographing her own sexual life at twenty and posting the results on her personal website, work that reached the photographer Eric Kroll and, through him, Taschen. The book's images carry the particular color cast and close, snapshot framing of early digital sensors. Merritt shoots herself and her partners with a directness that treats the camera as a participant rather than a distant observer, a departure from the studio lighting and staged compositions of the erotic photography that preceded it.

Merritt (b. 1977) built a wider multimedia career after the book's success, including the internet series D-life and multimedia projections for Cirque du Soleil's Zumanity and Ovo. She later returned to school to study biology. Digital Diaries remains her best-known published work and an early, widely cited example of a photobook shaped by consumer digital technology rather than the darkroom.