A Seat at the Table

Lee Shulman, a British visual artist and filmmaker, is the founder of The Anonymous Project, which collects and preserves Kodachrome slides by amateur photographers from the past seventy years.

In the images from the 1940s to 1960s, he saw a persistent motif—warm, nostalgic portraits of white families living the “American dream,” with few traces of the Black experience. Often, there was an empty chair in the pictures, hinting at the presence of the photographer, who had momentarily stepped out of the frame. Shulman wondered: What if that chair wasn’t empty? What if his friend, the Senegalese artist Omar Victor Diop, sat there instead, a present-day figure time-traveling into scenes from a different America?

Diop was intrigued by the invitation to collaborate. A well-established photographer known for several series in which he appears in staged historical portraits and tableaux, he was drawn in by the emotional power of vernacular imagery and the poetic metaphor of the missing presence. Together, Shulman and Diop embarked on a yearlong creative journey, merging photography and cinematic storytelling. They placed Diop into a variety of scenes and situations—within family gatherings, participating in leisure activities, vacationing in national parks—and with each insertion, they explored the visual language of belonging.

The result was Being There, a series of photographs first published by Editions Textuel in 2023. Being There is not simply a group of Photoshopped images; it is a reimagined archive, a multilayered narrative exploring race, disappearance, and inclusion. The images challenge us to rethink whose lives have been documented in the vernacular tradition and what it means to occupy a space that history once denied.

The Getty Museum has acquired eight of the photographs and will display them from October 13 through January 19. I had seen the images at Paris Photo a couple of years ago and was immediately struck by them. Wanting to know more about the project, I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Shulman and Diop to hear their perspectives on their work and how it resonates today. Here’s what they had to say.

How did this collaborative project come about?

Lee Shulman: It all began with the recurring visual of an empty chair. In so many of The Anonymous Project’s images, the photographer has stepped out, leaving a literal and metaphorical space. I began imagining Omar sitting in that seat—joining the scene, completing the memory.

Omar Victor Diop: What attracted me to this project was, first of all, the collaborative nature of it. And I was intrigued by the symbolic and poetic value in the concept of the empty chair and everything we can make that chair say just through my presence in these images. Vernacular photography is something that everybody can connect to. It is universal. We all have family archives that, at the end of our lives, pour into this collective memory, and then it becomes something even greater. It’s fantastic terrain to work in.

Shulman: I really love these hybrid projects. My background as a filmmaker shaped how we approached each image—using storyboarding, cinematic lighting, period-specific wardrobe, and shooting on a film set in front of a green screen. And Omar is a great actor as well. It brought his practice and mine together effectively. It took a full year to produce the series of more than fifty images. Recently, we expanded the project to include a montage of home movies from the same era in which Omar is now a participant.

What is the attraction of vernacular photography—particularly Kodachrome—for you both?

Diop: There’s something deeply honest about these snapshots. They weren’t taken for art galleries or for history books. They’re lived moments—slices of life.

Shulman: We’re fascinated by the inherent mystery of amateur Kodachrome images, which don’t explain themselves. When you view them, you instantly become a coauthor, constructing a narrative that fits your own emotional response. That mystery is central to how vernacular images function.

Diop: At the same time, it is important to point out that Kodachrome had a significant limitation that was a kind of built-in form of racism, as it was notoriously poor at capturing Black skin tones accurately. That technicality may be why African American families didn’t widely use it.

Shulman: My archive does include African American family photos, but during this era, they never mixed with white subjects.

What guided your selection of the original images?

Diop: We wanted to select every moment that makes a life beautiful and normal. So, there are many situations where the character I am playing is at home, at a party, in a professional setting, or on vacation. We really wanted to create this illusion of an ordinary life for an African American who had been historically excluded in that America.

Shulman: We storyboarded it a lot. I remember we had all the images up on the wall, and it felt like we were creating a narrative about this person’s life. Each setting had to feel authentic and intimate while leaving room for Omar’s insertion and participation. We spent a lot of time looking at the other people and their reactions. The idea of integrating Omar’s character into shared moments was essential to making the selections.

I do see consistency in the types of images you chose. It becomes clear that your project is not primarily about documentation or history, but about moments of human connection.

Shulman: Absolutely. Once you convert a photograph into pure fact, it loses its poetry. I mean, I call my collection The Anonymous Project for a reason, but it is really an emotional rather than a documentary project.

Diop: Two things are essential to this work. The first is imagination, and the other is mystery. And that’s actually the essence of The Anonymous Project. And that’s what made me love the project enough to be associated with it. We want to preserve that and give viewers the freedom to create their own narratives for each image. We want to give them moments to dream, to question, to project their own stories.

Shulman: In the original slides, there is always a privileged relationship between the photographer and the subject.

Diop: It’s a loving gaze.

Shulman: And I feel this when I see the photos. What’s wonderful about Omar’s character in these images is that he’s usually looking at the camera—so he’s actually looking at me, and we’re friends. We share that personal connection with the original photographers and their subjects, and I think that contributes to why this project works so well. Omar becomes a part of these images not just formally but emotionally.

I know that these are not simple Photoshopped images. Tell me more about the process of creating the works.

Shulman: A great deal of time and effort was spent matching the technical aspects of the original images—the color, focus, lighting, and any imperfections. We worked in a studio where Omar posed in front of a green screen, and I positioned myself to match the perspective of the original Kodachrome. That means for some images I stood on a ladder and for others I was lying on my back on the floor. We went into each shot with a plan, but then we captured two or three different poses for each image. We had a digital retoucher on set who could make a quick collage on the computer just to place Omar into the image live.

Diop: My wardrobe is vintage and carefully chosen to match the other people in the photographs. Sometimes I am holding props—tumblers, coffee cups, cameras, golf clubs, etc.—and as I look at many of these photographs now, I find it hard to remember whether I was actually holding the object or whether it was part of the original image.

Omar’s character is a delightful presence throughout this series, and there is a whimsical quality to the work. But there is another layer that is much more serious: the reality that many of these spaces were literally segregated in midcentury America, including public golf courses and swimming pools, and that miscegenation laws criminalized mixed-race couples.

Shulman: That’s the whole thing. I mean, it’s the idea of comedy and tragedy living in the same space. These images are funny, but they are sad as well. That balance between the humor of the project and the political aspect of it, and the tragedy of this moment, is all there. We were very conscious of that idea and tried hard to get the balance right. It was something we thought about and discussed a lot.

Diop: For me, photography is democracy. The Grand Canyon, for example, belongs to everyone, yet historically, national parks were white-coded spaces. To be visibly present, there is an act of affirmation.

Shulman: One of the most painful images for me is the swimming pool scene. It’s the one where Omar’s character is surrounded by a vast gathering of white people. It really brings home the message that we are trying to convey.

Diop: There is one in which my character is at a graduation day, and he’s the only Black guy, which shows the lack of access to opportunity. You know this is what happens when exclusion is normalized. My brother, who’s African and dark like me, is married to an American Irish woman whom we love. And my nephews are mixed young Americans. So, there has been progress, but much of this progress is now under threat again. It’s a reminder not to sleep, not to get comfortable seeing crowds that are homogenous with no room for difference.

Shulman: In some images, like the group of businessmen in a pub, the empty chair could belong to so many others. There is a bigger message about people in general who have been excluded, whether it’s women or members of the LGBTQ community or people of color. That chair belongs to somebody who should be there. It’s a reminder that when you’re out, you should look around and be conscious of these situations and of that empty chair waiting to be filled.