Martin Parr & The Anonymous Project: Déjà View
This book is a playful conversation between two important bodies of photographic work. Each spread of Déjà View pairs one of Martin Parr’s iconic snapshots with an image from The Anonymous Project’s collection of found amateur photographs taken between the 1950s and 80s. These unnervingly similar ‘twin’ pictures remind us of photography’s greatest power: to intimately preserve everyday moments of humor, warmth, ennui, and absurdity.
This is the first edition.
About the Authors
The Anonymous Project
In 2017 when filmmaker Lee Shulman bought a random box of vintage slides he fell completely in love with the people and stories he discovered in these unique windows into our past lives.
Collecting and preserving unique color slides from the last 70 years, the project was born out of a desire to preserve this collective memory and give a second life to the people often forgotten in these timeless moments captured in stunning Kodachrome color.
From the period of the early 1950s, when prices for color photography had dropped to where it became accessible to non-professionals, to the rise of digital cameras, color photography soon developed into the dominant medium to capture daily life. Not just weddings and graduations, or friends posing for friends, or families gathering for portraits, but everything.
The magic of color photography is that when the chemicals on the film are exposed to light, color is created. The problem is that these chemicals degrade over time, eventually leaving no trace of the image. Most color slides will not survive beyond 50 years. Unless urgent action is taken, this colorful piece of our collective memory, artifacts of daily life from the 40’s up through the digital age, will fade out of existence altogether.
These amateur photographs are a kaleidoscopic diary of that era, all the more fascinating and arresting because of their unpolished quality. Often funny, surprising, and touching these images tell the stories of all our lives.
The Anonymous Project has in turn become an artistic endeavor that seeks to give meaning to these once-forgotten memories and create new ways of interpretation and storytelling that question our place in the world today.
Martin Parr is one of the best-known documentary photographers of his generation. With over 100 books of his own published, and another 30 edited by Parr, his photographic legacy is already established.
Parr also acts as a curator and editor. He has curated two photography festivals, Arles in 2004 and Brighton Biennial in 2010. More recently Parr curated the Barbican exhibition, Strange and Familiar. Parr has been a member of the Magnum agency since 1994 and was President from 2013 – 2017. In 2013 Parr was appointed the visiting professor of photography at the University of Ulster. Parr’s work has been collected by many of the leading museums, from the Tate, the Pompidou and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Martin Parr established the Martin Parr Foundation in 2017. In 2019 the National Portrait Gallery in London held a major exhibition of Parr’s work titled Only Human
