Unidentified Artist, 445 Portraits of a Man, ca. 1930s-40s, Photomatic photo booth silver gelatine prints
Image by Peter Jacobs
A haunting collection of 445 vintage photobooth images of an unidentified man is currently on display for the first time as part of a new exhibition called ‘Striking Resemblance: The Changing Art of Portraiture’ at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University.
Taken in the years between the Great Depression and the 1960s, the silver gelatine prints show an unassuming man dressed in suits and bowties smiling for the camera.
They are owned by historian Donald Lokuta, a friend of Zimmerli museum curator Donna Gustafson. The two had speculated that the anonymous man could be a photobooth employee who took pictures as part of his job, although it doesn’t explain their vast number.
While self portraits are common these days, what’s intriguing is that the man in the photographs seemed to be hinting at some notion of sequence or linear order in a time where such ideas were unheard of.
“The concept of the series has been going on in contemporary art since the 1970s; it’s a very conceptual way of thinking. But what struck me was that these portraits were taken as early as the 1930s and ‘40s, before many of us were thinking conceptually about photography,” said Gustafson.
The exhibition runs til 13 July and you can find out more about it here.
Unidentified Artist, 445 Portraits of a Man, ca. 1930s-40s, Photomatic photo booth silver gelatine prints
Image by Peter Jacobs
Unidentified Artist, 445 Portraits of a Man, ca. 1930s-40s, Photomatic photo booth silver gelatine prints
Image by Peter Jacobs
Unidentified Artist, 445 Portraits of a Man, ca. 1930s-40s, Photomatic photo booth silver gelatine prints
Image by McKay Imaging Photography
[via The Huffington Post, images by Peter Jacobs and McKay Imaging Photography]