Lost & Found

Whether by accident or design, our family photo albums and slide carousels reflect the art of everyday and often the art of the mistake.  This idea led to one collector to search for amateur photographs and objects that are disappearing. Every object and  photograph in this exhibition was lost—lost by chance, by circumstance—was sold, or ended up in a swap meet or on Ebay. Some of the objects are exactly as we found them and some have been re-purposed, re-constituted, recreated—transformed. So many of these photographs—poignant, funny, revealing, beautiful—could only have been taken by a trusted friend, loved one or family member. Every person captured in photographs here, Lorraine, Bob, Flo and unnamed others, had lives full of stories.

The exhibition includes a early photo booth prints, studio portraits taken between The Great Depression and the Second World War, an archive of mugshots from the San Francisco Police Department, a collection of portraits made by a hairdresser in the midwest in the 1960’s who documented his creations and prints with letters home from soldiers at war.   The private collection, from which the photographs and objects come includes over 7,000 snapshots, Kodachrome slides, original negatives, letters and objects sourced from Ebay, swap meets, auctions and vernacular dealers over two decades. Collaborating with master printer Jean-Pierre Baudin, our curatorial team chose some of our favorite images and created brilliant large scale silver gelatin prints.

One evening, scrolling through eBay, the collector happened upon a listing for two worn and weathered child’s rakes.  The seller’s description said ‘Set of Childs old garden rakes. These have always been together :)’. How that moved us! A reconstruction of a house and those two rakes are at the heart of the exhibition.

We look forward to welcoming you!