Unless you're a real stunner, with the face of an angel and the body of a god, or simply incredibly, incredibly vain, you probably don't enjoy people taking photos of you. At least that's how the theory goes, just skim through any magazine, or force yourself to sit through a bout of TV ads and all you'll see are, at the very least, perfectly attractive people, and if not, even the uglies have character, they'd be the pin-ups for the uglies around our way. But there's more to it, that is to day, the dubious pleasure or torture of being photographed, and that's got to be the standing still and waiting with a fixed grin, whilst what seems to be the rest of the world stops and stares at the idiots smiling at a beauty spot somewhere. Then there's the disappointment afterwards where you'll weigh up lighting and composition with other factors like a bad hair day, a spot, or general wear and tear.
I never liked people taking photographs of me as a kid, my mum had to do her best to hide those of me, by the age of ten I had managed to destroy most of the Polaroids (yes it was the 70s) that featured even the slightest glimpse of my face. Nowadays things are different, the youth, the tweens, teens and twenties are so bang in to cellphones that it's inevitable that millions upon millions of them have photos of themselves, each other, and anyone else they can find in between. But way back when phones sat on a small table by the front door, it was a rather horrendous process for most kids. The two worst being the school photo, where a few hundred kids would stand and stare vacantly for an incompetent photographer to 'get the light just right'. and photo-booths, perhaps one of the most traumatizing inventions ever created. More like an instrument of social torture, after years of jumping in with mates and girlfriends for a laugh, the time came when all of us for whatever official sounding reason, be it a passport or a job application, would need to smarten ourselves up and sit for an excruciatingly uncomfortable minute, and then hover outside in the hope of masking the results from the wider public.
For whatever reasons, perhaps lateness for a train or plane, or in the rush to pack up after a fractious split with a partner, the time will come when all of us will leave a photo of ourselves behind, be it at the airport, station, back of a cab, ex-partners' bed, or down the back of a bookshelf we haven't cleaned in a million years. That is when the site www.isthisyou.co.uk in true Duchampian fashion steps in, their loyal followers go out of the way to find what you have lost, primarily photos of strangers. Photos that others have, for whatever reason, if any, have left behind in a public space. What's more, most likely through word-of-mouth, a sizeable slice of them are reclaimed by their original owners, you can tell which ones as their thumbnails state 'found'.
If you're a fan of Marcel Duchamp's 'Readymades', found objects he himself took the bold notion of introducing to the art gallery system, such as his 1917 piece, La Fontaine for instance, a urinal straight from the factory signed by R.Mutt, a worker on the production line, then you can see the attraction for me, at least, in the concept behind 'Is This You'. The format is a powerful array of lost identities, people in their everyday lives, places and objects, are forced into the limelight and viewed by the public as 'something else', a something else that I'd suggest is art. Not the photos themselves as much as the arrangement, the system of imagery displayed, without context or purpose. Almost like a lost property office for people, a gallery of life's snippets, a scatterlogical snapshot of humanity itself. ITY brings up many questions and ideas, the value of technology for instance, when photography was first invented it was a rare and precious pleasure to be photographed, usually in an official or historical capacity, recording the lives and events of society at the time. Genetic differentiation is another, the multiplicity of features, colours and creeds, or simply as an archive of a time when for many it seems that we the human race are drowning in our own number.
I as a child once came across a box of old photographs in an attic, they weren't of myself or my family, but of what I assume were former owners of our home, people who had lived whole lives in the same space, yet a different reality than me. One of my first reactions was an underlying emotional reaction something like grief watered down to a homoeopathy of mild trepidation and a veneer of respect. The fact is that I instinctively knew I was looking at imagery of the dead, and as a young boy this was an alien experience for me, something I wouldn't experience again for quite a few years.
Another most fascinating section to the site features lost and found ephemera, notes, many scrawled onto the nearest available source of paper, offering little insight into others' lives but instead revealing the shared mundanity we all live through each day in our attempt to keep up with a vast and over-complicated system we call society. Everyday lives taken out of context, freeze framed moments from unknown lives offer something painfully familiar, depressingly even.
There's a poetry to this site, a strangely beguiling longing that exudes from their collection of lost people, places, things and ideas. Something akin to the shop in 'Bagpuss', although their are no mice on the mouse organ to fix it this time. See more lost identities at www.isityou.co.uk.
There are a few other sites that offer something similar if you fancy getting lost in a world of found imagery and objects…
Dave's found photos
Pictures i found on the street
Going Underground: London underground fan site
Found Magazine
Crude Multimedia
Yahoo 'found photography' links
Joachim Schmid archive
Lost Something?
Temple Print
Skull Print
