FOUND Polaroids
by FOUND Magazine
Quack! Media
2006
FOUND Polaroids is a small art book published by the creators of FOUND Magazine, showing off some of their collection of Polaroid pictures. FOUND was a collective art project started in the early 2000s. The founders, Davy Rothbart and Jason Bitner, used the internet to solicit people to send them things they found that other people has lost, especially things like old notes and pictures. FOUND Magazine then curated the submissions and published a zine, then a magazine, then several books. In my mind, I place it in the same category as PostSecret.
I'm not completely sure of the criteria for photos in this book, beyond that they're Polaroids. (Surely their storehouse of regular film photos is much fuller.) Are these the best, the most interesting, or an attempt at a representative selection? Each two-page spread has a photo, the name of the sender, where it was found, and sometimes some additional context, like the circumstances of the find, or the sender's thoughts about what the photo depicts. These vary quite a bit in length, from just the bare facts conveyed in a handful of words (tweet-length with characters left over) up to a couple paragraphs.
There are no chapters or section breaks, but the photos are mostly grouped by topic. There are photos of parents with children, teens, parties, home interiors (including several bathrooms), cars, home exteriors, damaged or graffitied photos, people with pets, people with Santa, people with friends.
Some of the photos seem like real losses - sentimental images the owner probably wanted to keep, sometimes discovered after an eviction. Others kind of seem like trash, not so much lost as littered or dropped. They vary in condition, mostly clean, a few pretty dirty and scuffed up, none pristine.
Some of the photos, quite frankly, are boring. Some were so dark or blurry you could scarcely see anything, a couple were extreme close ups of stairs or walls, and some are just dull because they show an ugly, undistinguished landscape, shot with no sense of composition. I'd throw them away too! But the photos of people tended to be more interesting, if only because you might wonder what they're doing, what their relation is to each other or their photographer. One of the damaged photos had been found in a puddle, and the image was discolored as a result, which I thought was fascinating.
I'm not completely sure of the criteria for photos in this book, beyond that they're Polaroids. (Surely their storehouse of regular film photos is much fuller.) Are these the best, the most interesting, or an attempt at a representative selection? Each two-page spread has a photo, the name of the sender, where it was found, and sometimes some additional context, like the circumstances of the find, or the sender's thoughts about what the photo depicts. These vary quite a bit in length, from just the bare facts conveyed in a handful of words (tweet-length with characters left over) up to a couple paragraphs.
There are no chapters or section breaks, but the photos are mostly grouped by topic. There are photos of parents with children, teens, parties, home interiors (including several bathrooms), cars, home exteriors, damaged or graffitied photos, people with pets, people with Santa, people with friends.
Some of the photos seem like real losses - sentimental images the owner probably wanted to keep, sometimes discovered after an eviction. Others kind of seem like trash, not so much lost as littered or dropped. They vary in condition, mostly clean, a few pretty dirty and scuffed up, none pristine.
Some of the photos, quite frankly, are boring. Some were so dark or blurry you could scarcely see anything, a couple were extreme close ups of stairs or walls, and some are just dull because they show an ugly, undistinguished landscape, shot with no sense of composition. I'd throw them away too! But the photos of people tended to be more interesting, if only because you might wonder what they're doing, what their relation is to each other or their photographer. One of the damaged photos had been found in a puddle, and the image was discolored as a result, which I thought was fascinating.
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