Lee Shulman & The Anonymous Project

Lee Shulman is a visual artist, filmmaker, and founder of The Anonymous Project, one of the most significant archives of vernacular color photography in existence. Since 2017, the project has amassed nearly one million Kodachrome slides from the 1940s to the early 2000s — intimate, everyday images that might have otherwise been lost to time. Through curation and transformation, Shulman reanimates these personal photographs, weaving them into compelling narratives that explore memory, family, love, and cultural shifts across generations.

Shulman’s practice is deeply rooted in preservation and reinvention. His work takes many forms that reimagine the original slide, from Cibachrome prints and lightboxes to immersive installations and digital interventions. By placing vintage snapshots in a contemporary context, he invites reflection on our shared visual history and its resonance today. In an era where photographs are increasingly created and consumed digitally, his sculptural works — such as jewel boxes containing unique vintage slides — underscore the enduring connection between photography, memory, and materiality. Collaboration is integral to his approach, and he has worked closely with artists such as Omar Victor Diop and Martin Parr to expand the project’s dialogue.

At its core, Shulman’s work engages with one of photography’s most democratic qualities: its accessibility. His practice follows in the lineage of artists and curators such as Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Stephen Shore, and John Szarkowski, who championed the raw immediacy of the amateur snapshot. However, Shulman takes this engagement a step further, embracing the anonymous and collective nature of these images to build a living archive of modern life. As he puts it, “Photography is for people, not just for people who work in photography.”

Vernacular photography has long flourished through storytelling and a playful sense of wit, often revealed in the sequencing of family albums. This narrative impulse is at the core of Shulman’s work, inviting viewers to piece together their own stories from the images he assembles. His expertise in film informs his cinematic approach, with his photographs often reading as single frames from an unseen film. This extends beyond photography; he continues to direct films as part of his practice, including I Am Martin Parr (2024) and Being There (2025).

Born in London in 1973, Shulman lives and works in Paris. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale and Rencontres d’Arles, and is held in major collections such as the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and Photo Elysée in Lausanne. To date, ten monographs of his work have been published.

This spring, work by Lee Shulman & The Anonymous Project will be on view in two exhibitions in our gallery. The first is the inaugural exhibition at our new space at 693 Fifth Avenue, a group show called New Construction(s), opening March 15. Following that, our gallery will stage the U.S. premiere of Being There, a collaboration with Omar Victor Diop, on view from April 22 to June 14.