IMS_Blog

Seen via what seems an awful lot of places, Lost Films caught me on its hook. The use of found photographs is well established in art, and there are plenty of sites around dealing with them (just Google it). What makes this different is they’re not found photographs but, as the title suggests, found films. Nobody has seen these before, not even the photographer, which adds more sadness, and longing that maybe one day somebody in one of them might stumble across them. The whole thing is made better by captions probably best described as quirky (even if the author has some strange ideas about how bad the English weather is), extending to poetry (this one I actually quite like, though my brain keeps telling me I’ve heard it somewhere before?)

I think the thing that got me though was not just the photos (poignant, surreal, aching and fascinating as they are) but the process. To have a skill to do something such as drag a little piece of history forwards. Makes me wish I had some gift like that; to do something, not necessarily useful but…living, human.

My favourite? Possibly this photo. I wonder if there’s someone out there who remembers a rocking horse, and a lovely, friendly cat.