My project

Very often when basic photography is chosen to a collection it is open to any kind of explanation. It is very much to the collector to decide how they want to present it either to add some text to it or simply to have it the way it is put together, as ‘[i] t can be refashioned, re-imagined, re-sequenced, made into multitude of different stories.’ (Kessels).

So for this reason, I decided in this self-publishing project to produce a collection book of found photos. My intention was to find photos at car-boot sales, street markets and second hand shops. When I started looking for images I noticed that black and white photos were more common to find and very often very interesting: I have always loved old photos. They are story-telling images for me as they provide an insight into the era of which they were taken in. Such old images, which are not common in our own time, show for instance the way people dressed and so they give a hint of fashion trends from the era or time they were taken. The images were perhaps part of a family collection, but now and for viewers today they are objects of curiosity and constitute part of history. Sometime they almost give a feeling of looking at something unreal, or even images of ghosts. “The initial purpose of the photographs makes the images slightly haunting.” (Kessels).

My collection gives a sense of being from the early period of the last century, from the1900s to the 1960s. My book is made up by 28 black and white prints where the main subjects are humans. In addition to the possible histories behind the prints, I also found these photos interesting because of the condition they were in when I found and bought them. Some of them were torn, dirty, faded and most had written texts on the flipside. These texts were explanations, greetings or a note of the date when they were taken. While some were in bad condition others were found in isolated plastic bags so they weren’t damaged or faded easily.