ABOUT
In 2017, when filmmaker Lee Shulman bought a random box of vintage slides, he fell completely in love with the people and stories he discovered in these unique windows into our past lives.
Collecting and preserving unique color slides from the last 70 years, the project was born out of a desire to safeguard this collective memory and give a second life to the people often forgotten in these timeless moments captured in stunning Kodachrome color.
From the early 1950s, when the price of color photography dropped to make it accessible to non-professionals, to the rise of digital cameras, color photography quickly developed into the dominant medium for capturing daily life. It wasn’t just weddings and graduations, friends posing for friends, or families gathering for portraits it was everything.
The magic of color photography lies in the way light reacts with the chemicals on the film to create color. The problem is that these chemicals degrade over time, eventually leaving no trace of the image. Most color slides will not survive beyond 50 years. Without urgent action, this colorful piece of our collective memory artifacts of daily life from the 1940s to the digital age will fade out of existence entirely.
These amateur photographs are a kaleidoscopic diary of that era, all the more fascinating and compelling because of their unpolished quality. Often funny, surprising, and touching, these images tell the stories of all our lives.
The Anonymous Project has since become an artistic endeavor that seeks to give meaning to these once-forgotten memories and create new ways of interpreting and storytelling that question our place in the world today.
This website brings together a unique selection of images from the private collection of Lee Shulman.
All images ©The Anonymous Project / Lee Shulman