Artist Unknown

The hundreds of images that make up Artist Unknown were all found on the Internet and were all taken in the twentieth century. At some point these pictures were separated from their original owners and reclaimed by others, who in turn chose to upload them to the Web. As they stand now, they occupy an undefined and immaterial space somewhere between the analog and digital worlds: they’ve been rescued from physical deterioration and at the same time opened up to the potential for endless manipulation and digital redistribution. While temporarily affixed to these pages, they are simultaneously circulating around the Web, passed from viewer to viewer and blog to blog, transcending borders and in a constant process of mutation. These are pictures in motion.
The few hundred pictures presented here were culled from over a hundred thousand images, uploaded by thousands of individuals who, one imagines, found them in thrift stores and yard sales or perhaps found them, as I have, on the Internet and simply reblogged them. With screen names like “Superbomba” and “Sarcoptiform”, the people sharing these pictures participate in a kind of crowdsourced curatorial practice, posting pictures to Flickr, Tumblr, Pinterest or any one of a thousand similar sites on the Web and creating an archive of analog images larger than anything a single individual or institution could ever hope to amass. Without their labors this project would not exist, and I’m indebted to them for their unsolicited collaboration.