Photo Trouvee

"Photo Trouvee" brings together 285 anonymous 'amateur' photographs, which were discovered and collected over a period of over twenty years in flea markets and antique shops. They are taken from the private collections of Michel Frizot, one of the most highly respected photohistorians in France and internationally, and his colleague Cedric de Veigy, professor of photography and film. These images once belonged to hundreds of now anonymous men and women, both young and old, city- and country-dwellers. They show family reunions and individual portraits, holiday scenes and urban landscapes, still lives and everyday objects. Seen together, they form what the authors call "an anthropology of the ordinary". But however ordinary their subjects might be, the photographs themselves are certainly never mundane. Collections of 'amateur' photographs often display the images as being kitsch or funny; here the approach is very different. The images have been selected as much for the atmosphere and universal feelings of humanity that they engender as for their intrinsic quality as photographs; in fact, they often provoke more questions in the viewer than they answer. As photographs portraying scenes of everyday life, originating both from the past and nearer to the present, they conjure up familiar images and emotions in the reader, be it of a place, a person, a gesture, or simply an atmosphere. The images are presented in 18 carefully edited sections of 13, 15 or 17 images, with each picture displayed on a single page. Neither chronological nor thematic in arrangement, the images have been placed according to their composition, their tone, and the rhythm and narrative dimension of the photographs. Frizot and de Veigy introduce this collection of photographs in their own words, providing a concise explanation of their aims when collecting and curating this intimate and intensely atmospheric body of work.