Lee Shulman x The Anonymous Project

Lee Shulman is a British-French artist, filmmaker, and founder of The Anonymous Project, one of the most significant archives of vernacular color photography in the world. Based in Paris, he works across photography, video, installation, and physical fine art objects. His practice is rooted in the conviction that overlooked images and forgotten moments hold something too valuable to be allowed to fade, and his work gives them a second life through exhibitions, publications, installations, and collaborative projects that have been presented at venues including the Venice Biennale, the Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles, Kyotographie, and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. His work is held in major institutional collections including the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and Photo Elysée in Lausanne, and to date fourteen monographs of his work have been published.

At the core of Shulman’s practice is a deep preoccupation with time: how it is recorded, how it slips away, and what it means to bring the past into conversation with the present. He is, in many ways, a curator of collective memory, someone who mines the analog world for the stories it left behind and finds ways to make them speak again. A multiple award-winning film director recognized across more than a decade of work in advertising and music videos in both the UK and France, his cinematic instinct for narrative and sequencing runs through everything he makes. This is evident across his projects, from I Am Martin Parr (2025), a documentary portrait of the legendary Magnum photographer that Shulman both conceived and directed, to collaborations like Déjà View with Martin Parr, Being There with Omar Victor Diop, and Golden Memories, each of which opens up new ways of thinking about memory, identity, and collective history. His debut monograph Mid-Century Memories, published by Taschen, was named Photography Book of the Year by The Times.