The Anonymous Project

The Anonymous Project’s goals are to collect, scan, and catalogue colour photographic negatives and slides from the last 50 years.

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 Anonymous Project

Why ‘Anonymous’

The word ‘anonymous’ applies because the names of the people in the images as well as the names of those who provide them or those who took the pictures will never be known or shared. Nor are they relevant.

This is not about any one person or a particular artist seeking to express something publicly. Almost always these photographs were taken for one’s personal desire to savor a moment in time.

Often these amateur photos are technically imperfect—like life itself—and all the more compelling because of their imperfections. This project is akin to finding fading pages from an anonymous diary and placing them in a time capsule for future generations.