Who are the two women in this image and what are they laughing at? If it was the work of a famous photographer – and it very nearly could be, with its unforced intimacy and pleasingly cluttered composition – there might be enough background information swirling around to answer these questions and more.
But we have no clear idea where or when the shot was taken or by whom. It’s one of more than a million colour slides that Lee Shulman, a British artist and film-maker based in Paris, has amassed for The Anonymous Project, which he claims is the world’s largest collection of amateur photographs. It began in 2017 with an impulse buy of vintage slides on eBay. “When the box arrived I remember picking up these little squares from the 1950s and looking at the images,” says Shulman. “The colours were extraordinary.”
In 2018 he staged the first of many exhibits, in Paris. As word spread, boxes began arriving from donors around the world as well as eBay sellers, often without any context about the slides they contained. Shulman, who now has a team to help him with scanning, embraced this lack of specificity. “I realised that the attraction was really the emotional element of these images; it wasn’t so much the historical element,” he says, adding of the family holidays, dinner parties and other intimate scenes that make up the collection: “We all know these moments. They seem very familiar to us.”
He knows next to nothing about this image, which is included in a new show in Brussels. The make of slide suggests it was taken between 1950 and 1955. He guesses that it is from the American Midwest. Shulman appreciates that it, like many other contemporary photos in his collection, features women “smoking and drinking and having a good time”, contrary to what we might expect from the era, but their identities and source of their amusement remain unknown. Are they laughing at somebody on the other side of the room? Are they watching a funny programme on TV? It’s up to our imaginations to fill in the gaps.
The House, presented by Lee Shulman’s The Anonymous Project, is showing at Hangar, Brussels, until 17 May