Look Inside
Which art books, prints and posters are available by and about this artist? Here is a sample of items of interest to a typical collector:
Being There is a collaborative photographic project and photobook created by Senegalese fine-art photographer Omar Victor Diop and British director Lee Shulman, founder of TheAnonymous Project, published in 2023 by Éditions Textuel.
Theproject merges vintage mid-century color photography with modern performativeself-portraiture. Lee Shulman curated a collection of anonymous Kodachromecolor slides from the 1950s and 1960s that captured middle-class, predominantlywhite post-war American and European domestic life, including backyardbarbecues, beach outings, birthday parties, and suburban leisure. Omar VictorDiop, known for his theatrical self-portraits exploring Black identity andhistory, then posed and digitally inserted himself into roughly fifty of thesescenes. Directed and reassembled alongside Shulman, the staging matches thelighting, film grain, wardrobe, and color palette of the original slides,making Diop appear seamlessly embedded within these intimate moments.
Mid-centurycolor photography often projected an idealized, nostalgic vision of post-warprosperity, frequently masking the realities of racial segregation and societalexclusion. Diop's presence disrupts this narrative, using humor and performanceto question whose stories were recorded in informal vernacular history. Artcritic Taous Dahmani describes the project as an act of "repairingabsence", inserting a Black body into spaces where Black presence washistorically erased or marginalized. While visually warm and playful, theseries creates an intentional tension between the comfortable nostalgia ofretro imagery and the political realities of representation.
Thispublication by Textuel presented the series for the first time through 56 colorplates. It stands as a compelling example of how contemporary performance canre-examine historical archives to challenge dominant cultural narratives.
In 2017 filmmaker Lee Shulman bought a random box of Kodachrome slides and was so taken by the people and stories he discovered that he decided to create an ongoing archive, which he has called The Anonymous Project.
Dressed to Impress, one of the books coming out of that endeavor, aims to preserve the collective memory of the way we lived in an increasingly distant past. It features more than 200 vibrant, candid color slides, presented in stunning full-page spreads, that reflect how people dressed in all kinds of settings— at home and on vacation, playing and working, partying and hanging out. The images have, for the most part, never been printed or published and their raw, unpolished quality makes them all the more fascinating and arresting. In turns funny, startling, and touching, this collection provides a unique and intimate glimpse into the fashion and everyday experiences of real people during a transformative period in our common history.
Lee Shulman British, b. 1973
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).
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. As of 2025, fourteen monographs of Lee Shulman & The Anonymous Project's work had been published.
