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by Trystan L. Bass
Fri, August 10, 2007, 8:00 am PDT

Everybody seems to have a shoebox or two full of family snapshots. But Nicholas Osborn has about 100,000 photos in his apartment. And they're not even of his own relatives. For the past decade, Nick has collected vintage photos from flea markets and eBay, and he shares around 4,000 of his pre-1980s snaps on his web site, Square America, which we reviewed in 2005.

"I really wanted to collect fine art photography," Nick admits, "but couldn't afford it so snapshots seemed like a cheap, fun alternative." And these photos soon charmed him in their own right:" I realized just how amazing some of the photographs I was finding were—totally different from but every bit as interesting as anything you'd see hanging in a gallery."

The web site started simply as a way to organize this growing collection, especially as Nick saw themes developing. "I certainly never set out to collect photos of people sleeping," he notes, "but at some point I realized that I had over a hundred of them, and the site was a great excuse for me to get them all together in one place and assess what I have." Read the full profile...

by Erik Gunther
Fri, January 12, 2007, 3:00 am PST

We love found objects. There, we said it. Given our proclivity, this site is a welcome twist on the provenance of items left behind and forgotten. The site's title comes from a lost journal purchased at a knickknack store in Hong Kong. This vintage diary was then carefully scanned page by page to reveal its treasure trove of contents. The twist? Just about everything in the book is written in Chinese characters. The site hopes to harness the power of the Web in order to unlock the mysteries within this long-forgotten book. If your translation skills are sharp and you have a few minutes to contribute, your efforts can help unravel tiny secrets that otherwise would have been lost to the sands of time.

Filed under: Asia, Lost and Found, Journals

by Molly McCall
Mon, November 20, 2006, 3:00 am PST

Like many major cities, Los Angeles doesn't like it when shopping carts are discarded on its streets—and it's passed legislation forbidding it. Now, photographer Morgan Hager takes to the sidewalks, ravines, and fields of the City of Angels to document the outlaw carts in the wild. In the process, he does for the shopping cart what Sam Mendes did for the plastic bag in "American Beauty": He lends it a mournful dignity. Here, various carts nose up to garbage cans, linger under a tree, or park beneath a "No Parking" sign. Sometimes the metal wheeled bins lurk far off in the distance, as if too shy or wary to come closer. It's almost heartening to see some form of contact between the "modern-day pack mule" and another object, even if it is just a lone plastic bag. (They meet, at last!)
by Molly McCall
Wed, October 11, 2006, 3:00 am PDT

These days, a quarter won't buy you much—some stickers from a gumball machine, maybe, or a few minutes on a parking meter. But for one enterprising individual, 25 cents scored an undeveloped roll of film from a busted-up Nikon in a junk shop. And though the investment only yielded a few photos, those images were so saturated in color, so evocative of a time long ago in the lives of anonymous folk, that soon our enthusiast was rummaging for more used-but-abandoned film. A collection emerged: of giant cows, giant Santas, and giant American cars; of strangers' birthdays and weddings and days at the beach; of unknown girls in Easter pastels and mysterious men flashing a bit of skin. And then, with The MangoFalls Camera Project, our enthusiast shared his (or her?) splendid Kodachrome collection with the world.
by Jill Robinson
Sat, January 21, 2006, 3:00 am PST

Have you ever found a postcard on the street? One that was clearly meant to be mailed, but just fell out of someone's bag on the way to the mailbox? Did you read it? Did you mail it? That's just what Justin Lundgren wants to know in this "experiment in found art." When he evacuated his flooded house in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he saved some photos of Mardi Gras and New Orleans that he'd intended to display in a gallery. Instead, he turned them into postcards, addressed them to a friend in Ohio, and wrote different messages from fake people who hold questionable views or recount outrageous experiences. He then stamped them and "lost" them throughout the city. Of the 99 postcards, 47 of them found their way back East. Scroll your way through the mailbag and browse the recovered cards. One even has an additional, "Found on sidewalk!" scrawled in rescuer handwriting.

Filed under: New Orleans, Lost and Found


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