Photos: The Anonymous Project
Text: Agnès Bardon, UNESCO
They are both foreign and yet familiar. Photos from before the digital age and selfies, before Instagram. Their vintage colours and gelatin-silver grain give off a curious air of innocence – and melancholy. The protagonists have no names. We know nothing about them, or the person who, one day, captured these scenes of ordinary life on film. All we know is the country and the year (the pictures presented here were taken between 1950 and 1980 in the United States and the United Kingdom).
Yet the child smeared with ice cream, the grandfather dozing in his armchair, the young girl in a bathing cap on the beach could all be our relatives. We have never seen them before, but we recognize them. They could be in one of those albums that every family used to make, even just a few years ago, to record memories of birthday parties, laughing babies or picnics by the roadside.
“The Anonymous Project” was started by British filmmaker Lee Shulman. Since 2017, he has been collecting films and slides taken by unknowns around the world and exhibiting selections in London, New York, Paris and Seoul. Many of the images date from the 1950s and 1960s, when colour photography was becoming widely available. Carefully preserved, they have ended up becoming orphaned as their protagonists disappear.
Deprived of their original meaning – of documenting personal memories – they nevertheless transmit an unexpected emotion, fantasy and aesthetic force. It is no coincidence that some of the great names in photography have seized upon these archives, such as the British photographer Martin Parr who, in his book Déjà View, places his images in conversation with those from Lee Shulmann's collection, blurring the distinction between amateur and professional photographs. As well as being a reflection of our own personal memories, the photographs in the Anonymous Project collection also delve into our collective memory, documenting the advent of post-war consumer society.
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