On the walls of the Magnum gallery in Paris, diptychs are hung, without captions. Here, bodybuilders proud of their abs; there, close-up of birthday cakes; here again, nails painted red enclosing the foot of a cup in a decor that we guess festive. One of the photos is signed by photographer Martin Parr, the other is anonymous, a scene of daily life unearthed from oblivion by Lee Shulman.
For five years, the Briton at the head of The Anonymous Project has been exhibiting prints of slide images from the 1930s to 1980s in elaborate stagings. From the walls of the Gare de Lyon, in Paris, to the parks of Rueil-Malmaison (Hauts-de-Seine), passing by the Olympic swimming pool of Deauville, the photography festival of Arles or the facade of the National Museum of automobile, in Mulhouse, but also in South Korea, New York, London… Everywhere, The Anonymous Project and its vintage aesthetics intrigue and question professional photographic practice. These amateur images of melancholic beauty become the vestiges of a time of innocence in the representation of the intimate self, to which the silver grain offers a veneer of authenticity in the age of Instagram filters.
“time capsules”
Lee Shulman, 49, is “fallen into” The Anonymous Project, in 2017, when, thanks to a move, his father returned him a box of slides dating from the time of his film studies. During his first year at the National Film School in London in the 1990s, Shulman accumulated dozens of portraits, mostly of strangers arrested in the streets of the British capital, where he was born. To train the eyes of the students, “the teachers had given instructions not to film anything for a year and to stick to the photo”, he explains.
At the end of his studies, Shulman signed with Partizan (the production company representing director Michel Gondry), and embarked on a career as a director of advertisements. A destiny mapped out for this son of an accountant who grew up not far from the film sets, in the wake of his father, a longtime friend and financial manager of the English director Ridley Scott. In the early 2000s, Shulman fell in love with a French woman and moved to Paris. On the professional side, he does a series of spots for Ikea, Leerdammer cheese, the Destop Turbo unblocker, shoots a few clips for Renan Luce or the singer Daphné…
“One is quickly forgotten in life. In three generations, no trace remains. » Lee Shulman
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