Book Description
"To isolate and pointedly categorize the anonymous is to postulate something both unusual and intriguing....The anonymous photograph...makes us ask, with new concentration, what it is about a photograph that elevates it above the casual and banal....What, in short, makes a photograph good?" —William Boyd In recent years, collectors and curators have begun to turn their attention to the great mass of anonymous photographs that excite our imagination with their seemingly random recording of public works and private lives. Like gold nuggets among worthless pebbles, the 200 classic images reproduced in this book include many of transcendent beauty and psychological insight, all with the magical, mysterious charge that comes from using our own imaginations to speculate on the circumstances in which they were taken. The number of collectors of anonymous photographs is growing exponentially: found objects in a flea market, available for a few dollars, the photos provide collectible visual narratives. Organized into the themes that govern our lives—from birth to death, from love to war, from travel to celebrity—the photographs gathered here are pleasurable and poignant, giving insight into the human secrets with which we can all identify. 200 photographs printed in color.

About the Author
Robert Flynn Johnson is Curator of Prints, Achenbach Foundation, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. He has been an avid collector of anonymous photographs for many years. William Boyd is the author of A Good Man in Africa, Blue Afternoon, and Any Human Heart.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In recent years, collectors and curators have begun to turn their attention to the great mass of anonymous photographs that excite our imagination with their seemingly random recording of public works and private lives. Like gold nuggets among worthless pebbles, the 200 classic images reproduced in this book include many of transcendent beauty and psychological insight, all with the magical, mysterious charge that comes from using our own imaginations to speculate on the circumstances in which they were taken.

The number of collectors of anonymous photographs is growing exponentially: found objects in a flea market, available for a few dollars, the photos provide collectible visual narratives. Organized into the themes that govern our lives—from birth to death, from love to war, from travel to celebrity—the photographs gathered here are pleasurable and poignant, giving insight into the human secrets with which we can all identify. 200 photographs printed in color.