• The Anonymous Project presents

    Being There

    Lee Shulman & Omar Victor Diop

    April 22 - June 14, 2025

    photograph of Lee Shulman and Omar Victor Diop inserted into vintage slide with car and road

    Lee Shulman & Omar Victor Diop, Being There 57, 2023.

    Being There is a bold and timely reimagining of 20th-century visual history. Conceived through a vibrant collaboration between British-French artist and filmmaker Lee Shulman—founder of The Anonymous Project, an expansive archive of mid-century amateur color photography—and Senegalese artist Omar Victor Diop, the series places Diop within original vernacular photographs, creating imagined yet believable scenes that invite viewers to reconsider who gets to be seen, remembered, and included.

     

    This US debut is a symbolic homecoming. Many of the original slides were taken in the United States, capturing family rituals, leisure moments, and the texture of daily life from the 1950s through the 1980s. Photography has long played a powerful role in both shaping and reflecting the American dream, especially through images made by everyday people, capturing joy, connection, and aspiration. Shulman’s placing of Diop inside these nostalgic moments expands their meaning with curiosity and grace. Diop doesn’t disrupt these images—he inhabits them, reclaiming space with poise, humor, and imagination.

     

    Rather than critique from a distance, Being There joins the archive in a spirit of play and purpose, offering a warm and generous invitation to reshape history. Blending performance, photography, and archival excavation, the project reshapes the American story quietly but powerfully, underscoring how visibility—especially within the imagery of the everyday—is not just symbolic, but essential to belonging. It speaks to the complexity of the nation’s cultural imagination, honoring its history while questioning who that history has served and who it has left out.

     

    The accompanying film, premiering at Edwynn Houk Gallery, brings these still moments into motion, transforming the archive into a living montage that deepens the series’ invitation to look again, and look closer.

  •  

    The outsider forces himself on an ‘inside’ previously inaccessible because of the homogeneity of the milieu. In this respect, it is interesting to note that, as early as the nineteenth century, the abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth demanded that Black Americans be granted the right to representation by being allowed to access portrait studios. In these circumstances, one easily understands the disturbing power of Diop’s presence in these images.

    —Taous Dahmani, "Trouble and Subversion in the Land of the Vernacular" in Being There (Paris, Textuel: 2023).

  • Making of: The Anonymous Project presents Being There

     

  • Lee Shulman (British-French, b. 1973) is a visual artist, filmmaker, and founder of The Anonymous Project, one of the most...
    Photograph of Omar Victor Diop and Lee Shulman

    Lee Shulman (British-French, b. 1973) 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 lives and works in Paris. 

     

    Omar Victor Diop (Senegalese, b. 1980) is a photographer and artist celebrated for his vivid portraits that intertwine history, fashion, and African identity. His work reimagines historical figures and events through a contemporary lens, exploring diasporic narratives and postcolonial themes. Blending photography with textile design, fashion, and creative writing, Diop creates rich, multidimensional stories that challenge and expand cultural perspectives. He lives and works between Dakar and Paris.