The way we were

When Lee Shulman opened up the box of vintage Kodachrome slides he’d bought on eBay and held one up to the light, “something just clicked”, he says. “It was a real Eureka moment. It’s the fact that you can only reveal the images by projecting light through the slide; there’s a kind of magic. The colours are incredible, they just glow. And there’s a real intimacy to so many of the images that is really powerful.” And so the Anonymous Project was born, starting life as a website that houses the scanned and digitised images but now expanding with books and exhibitions and associated art projects. 

Shulman is a Paris-based film director and photographer who has worked mostly in advertising and music video production. Although in his professional life he deals largely with digital images, like many photographers and filmmakers he has a love for the pure aesthetics of film. It was this that prompted him to send off for that first box of old slides, and once he started, he couldn’t stop, buying on eBay, at flea markets and taking donations from people who had found out about the work. “The project has only been going for two years, but in that time I’ve physically looked at 800,000 slides, and chosen 12,000 for the collection.

Kodachrome was the HDTV of its day. It produced very high-quality images and was an expensive process, which is why it eventually went out of business. I love the fact that there’s a hidden quality to the images, only revealed when light is shone through them. It’s light that’s the medium.” 

Launched by Eastman Kodak in 1935, it wasn’t until the early 1950s that the price of Kodachrome had fallen enough for home photographers to use it, which they did right through to the 1970s. Putting on a home slide show of holiday photos for family and neighbours became a staple of life. “I think of it as the first social media,” adds Shulman, who says it’s the intimacy of the images that he finds powerful, plus the fact that we know nothing about the subjects. “For me, that anonymity is important; I want viewers to connect with the emotion of the image, not the specifics of that person. I’m also very aware of the person taking the photograph, you can almost feel that emotional connection, between lovers, fathers, daughters, friends.”

But the images are also a fascinating time capsule of how we used to live: people standing proudly next to their cars, midcentury interiors, duffel-coated toddlers and beach musclemen. There’s also a timeless universality to many of the pictures, which feature embracing couples, family celebrations, much-loved pets and happy holidays. 

Two years on, Shulman now works with a small team to develop the project. This summer saw an immersive exhibition, sponsored by French fashion house agnès b., at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival in Provence. There’s also an upcoming book, Midcentury Memories: The Anonymous Project, published by Taschen, with other books and shows in the pipeline. Shulman welcomes donations of slides from all over the world, and, as a Brit based in Paris, is especially keen to grow the UK part of the collection. “The British pictures have a very distinctive feel,” he says. “Some people dig out their slides to send to us, then start looking at them, and rediscover them themselves, which is great.

For Shulman, what matters most is the emotional content of the pictures, the privilege of being granted a glimpse of an unstaged moment of a life. Tenderness, hilarity, pride, sadness... all are on display here. As Shulman explains, often these amateur photos are technically imperfect – like life itself – and all the more compelling for that. “The project is akin to finding fading pages from an anonymous diary and placing them in a time capsule for future generations.”

The Anonymous Project would be interested in receiving donations of slides from readers of Goodwood Magazine. Contact info@anonymous-project.com

This article was taken from the Autumn 2019 edition of the Goodwood Magazine.