The shoebox cost four euros at a flea market in Brussels, and it contained around three hundred photographs of people nobody at the stall could name. A wedding party squinting into the sun. A boy on a bicycle, one sock fallen around his ankle. Two women laughing on a beach, their faces blurred by movement. On the back of one print, in faded pencil, someone had written a single word: Remember. The collector who bought the box, Émile Kasongo-Hart, has kept it on his desk for six years.
Kasongo-Hart is one of thousands of people around the world who collect vernacular photography, the anonymous snapshots taken by ordinary people for ordinary reasons. These images turn up by the million in flea markets, junk shops and house clearances, separated from the families who made them by death, migration or simple indifference. For most dealers, they are nearly worthless. For collectors, they are an inexhaustible archive of twentieth-century life, recording gestures, fashions and moments that official history never noticed.
The appeal is partly aesthetic. Amateur photographers, freed from the rules of professional practice, produced images of accidental strangeness: tilted horizons, double exposures, heads cut off by the frame, shadows of the photographer falling across the subject. Some collectors hunt specifically for these mistakes, finding in them a raw, unintended beauty that anticipates the experiments of avant-garde art. Others collect by theme, gathering hundreds of pictures of people posing with cars, or standing beside Christmas trees, or holding fish.
The ethics of the orphaned image
But the deeper appeal is emotional, and more complicated. To hold a found photograph is to hold a fragment of someone's private life, a moment they chose to preserve and that has somehow drifted loose. Collectors often speak of a sense of responsibility toward the people in their pictures. Kasongo-Hart describes himself not as an owner but as a temporary guardian. He has spent years researching some of his photographs, occasionally tracing descendants and returning images to families who did not know they existed.
Every one of these pictures was once the most precious thing in someone's drawer.
The ethics of the practice are not simple. The people in found photographs never consented to being collected, exhibited or sold, and some images capture moments of vulnerability their subjects might not want seen. Several recent exhibitions of vernacular photography have been criticised for treating anonymous people as curiosities. The most thoughtful collectors respond by displaying their images with restraint, avoiding sensational captions and resisting the temptation to invent stories about the people depicted.
There is also an urgency to the work. The analogue snapshot was the dominant form of family memory for most of the twentieth century, and the prints that survive are now ageing, fading and being thrown away at an accelerating rate as the generations who made them pass on. Meanwhile, our own photographs exist mostly as digital files, stored on devices and servers that may prove far less durable than paper. Some collectors see themselves as archivists of a medium that is vanishing.
Kasongo-Hart still does not know who wrote Remember on the back of that print. He has examined the handwriting, the photographic paper and the clothes of the people pictured, and concluded only that the box probably belonged to a single family in Brussels in the nineteen-fifties. He has made peace with not knowing. He takes the box down sometimes in the evenings and looks through it slowly, one face at a time. It seems the least he can do, he says, for people who wanted so badly to be remembered.
