They surface at flea markets and estate sales. Usually, they are just tossed in boxes and sold piecemeal.
These snapshots exist in vast numbers – too vast to quantify – and everyone knows this wasn't their intended fate. Still, there they are, surviving the person or family that once preserved them.
A professional fascination with such pictures isn't new. Influential photography curator and writer John Szarkowski put an anonymous picture on the cover of his classic book, "The Photographer's Eye," back in 1966. But interest in them is mushrooming.
"Close to Home: An American Album," the title of both a book and current exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, has an abundance of them and "Anonymous: Enigmatic Images From Unknown Photographers" offers even more.
As it turns out, the impetus for both books is collectors. Individuals buy these pictures for some of the same reasons they might acquire an Ansel Adams or a print by a promising young photographer who exhibits in museums and galleries: They are moved by them, fascinated by them and, ultimately, don't want to live without them.
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Anonymous
Enigmatic
Images From Unknown
Photographers
Robert Flynn Johnson
Thames & Hudson, 208 pages,
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220 illustrations, $45 |
Robert Flynn Johnson, a curator for the distinguished Achenbach Foundation for Graphics Arts in San Francisco, considers his collecting of uncredited pictures an obsession. In "Anonymous," he displays a marvelous fraction of his holdings, a collection that reaches beyond snapshots to a wide array of unsigned photographs.
Some landscapes are startlingly good, like a 19th-century sepia-tone picture of a distant boat on a wide panorama of water. There are charming and charmingly weird portraits of children. Animals grab the spotlight too, with choreographed rows of dogs and a little boy posing with a big jack rabbit.
Johnson categorizes his collection well. "Going Places" includes people traveling by pig-driven buggy as well as by car. "Signs and Messages" includes an eccentric 1936 bird's-eye image of the men at a naval training station arranging themselves into the shape of a Christmas tree.
The pictures are beautifully printed in "Anonymous," and Johnson writes well about his passion.
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Close to Home
An American Album
Weston Naef and D.J. Waldie
Getty Publications, 118 pages, $24.95
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"Close to Home," as its title says, sticks to the domestic side of anonymous photography. The black-and-white pictures, culled from three private collections, are less visually enticing. (There's engaging text by Getty curator Weston Naef and journalist D.J. Waldie.)
Some selections are captivating for the stories of familial affection, friendship and romance they suggest. The most seductive examples – cozy moments in Kodachrome – come from a fourth collection in which the photographers are named but still relatively obscure. Guy Stricherz and his wife Malli spent 17 years amassing them. Their obsession seems to have been as fruitful as Johnson's. The supply of tales that the pictures in both books suggest is probably inexhaustible.
Robert L. Pincus is the art critic of the San Diego Union-Tribune and writes often on photography.
