From the Anonymous Collection: Fire and a Boat

I'm feeling a bit of writer's block this morning, so I'm just going to shorten things up and share a couple of images from my anonymous collection.

The burning building photograph is the one that kicked off this hobby for me. I never had any thoughts about collecting non-fine-art photographs until this print was in my hands back in 2003. I even put it back and almost didn't purchase it. I remember almost leaving the store when I had an overwhelming feeling that I was making a mistake by not purchasing it, so I raced back to the box of prints it was in and made the purchase.

Whenever I start thumbing through a stack of photographic prints at an estate sale, or antique store, I think somewhere in my subconscious, I am secretly hunting for photographs that I wish I had taken myself. I also end up imagining a scene in the far future where someone is flipping through a stack of prints that I created. A few of those prints strike the right chords and they end up taking them home. Not because of a famous name attached to image, but just because they love the image. A sad, romanticized, zero-gratification aspect of my own photographer which I'll almost certainly not be aware of if I succeed with it. Yet, I'm cool with that.

I'm going to embed an interesting conversation with Robert Flynn Johnson that I found via citysnaps.net on the topic of anonymous photography. Robert Flynn Johnson is the author of Anonymous: Enigmatic Images from Unknown Photographers, a photo book about collecting vernacular photography.