Lee Shulman aka The Anonymous Projects

Lee Shulman’s Golden Memories draws upon The Anonymous Project, an extensive and ongoing archive he founded in 2017 that currently preserves nearly one million anonymous Kodachrome slides dating from the 1940s to the early 2000s. These photographs originate primarily from amateur photographers across the United Kingdom, the United States, and Western Europe, capturing the unvarnished rhythms of everyday mid-century domesticity, suburban leisure, family holidays, and quiet domestic rituals that were captured entirely for personal archives rather than public exhibition.

Thematic exploration centers on the collective nature of memory and the democratization of the photographic medium. By extracting these forgotten slides from flea markets, estate sales, and shoe boxes, Shulman transforms private mementos into a shared, universal mirror of modern existence. The work investigates how ordinary people document their own lives, capturing spontaneous gestures, shifting fashions, and domestic environments charged with nostalgia. Rather than highlighting a single individual's authored vision, the project operates as an archeological excavation of the twentieth-century subconscious, examining how collective memories are constructed, retained, and ultimately passed down through physical photographic objects.

Aesthetic presentation in Golden Memories emphasizes the tactile materiality of vernacular photography. Utilizing a distinct spiral-bound photobook format, the design mirrors the intimacy of personal scrapbooks and family albums. This physical structure heightens the sense of tactile engagement with printed matter, contrasting sharply with contemporary digital consumption and reinforcing the physical fragility and permanence of mid-century color transparency film.

Being There is a collaborative photographic project and photobook created by Senegalese fine-art photographer Omar Victor Diop and British director Lee Shulman, founder of TheAnonymous Project, published in 2023 by Éditions Textuel.

Theproject merges vintage mid-century color photography with modern performativeself-portraiture. Lee Shulman curated a collection of anonymous Kodachromecolor slides from the 1950s and 1960s that captured middle-class, predominantlywhite post-war American and European domestic life, including backyardbarbecues, beach outings, birthday parties, and suburban leisure. Omar VictorDiop, known for his theatrical self-portraits exploring Black identity andhistory, then posed and digitally inserted himself into roughly fifty of thesescenes. Directed and reassembled alongside Shulman, the staging matches thelighting, film grain, wardrobe, and color palette of the original slides,making Diop appear seamlessly embedded within these intimate moments.

Mid-centurycolor photography often projected an idealized, nostalgic vision of post-warprosperity, frequently masking the realities of racial segregation and societalexclusion. Diop's presence disrupts this narrative, using humor and performanceto question whose stories were recorded in informal vernacular history. Artcritic Taous Dahmani describes the project as an act of "repairingabsence", inserting a Black body into spaces where Black presence washistorically erased or marginalized. While visually warm and playful, theseries creates an intentional tension between the comfortable nostalgia ofretro imagery and the political realities of representation.

Thispublication by Textuel presented the series for the first time through 56 colorplates. It stands as a compelling example of how contemporary performance canre-examine historical archives to challenge dominant cultural narratives.

In 2017 filmmaker Lee Shulman bought a random box of Kodachrome slides and was so taken by the people and stories he discovered that he decided to create an ongoing archive, which he has called The Anonymous Project.

‍Dressed to Impress, one of the books coming out of that endeavor, aims to preserve the collective memory of the way we lived in an increasingly distant past. It features more than 200 vibrant, candid color slides, presented in stunning full-page spreads, that reflect how people dressed in all kinds of settings ' at home and on vacation, playing and working, partying and hanging out. The images have, for the most part, never been printed or published and their raw, unpolished quality makes them all the more fascinating and arresting. In turns funny, startling, and touching, this collection provides a unique and intimate glimpse into the fashion and everyday experiences of real people during a transformative period in our common history.