Looking back at the past few days of posts, I’ve thought about how critical I have been about various odd facets of the world inhabited, from art, advertising, disaster relief, and Microsoft (in that order). I don’t take any of it back but it’s good sometimes to find something slightly new and unexpurgated, even if it’s slightly exploitative: Look at Me is a website featuring photos “lost, forgotten, or thrown away.” The images contain the mostly happy faces of people in love, people embracing, people posing. The photos have been found all over the world and are posted by a lone ranger who seemingly cares about these quiet, still moments of captured time of faces forgotten in places known and unknown. Each image is a curiosity, a sinkhole, a lost nest, a mild conundrum.
You might like this one of glee, or this one of women who look masked, or this one of a lady who (as always) looks like her pet, or this one of five teen girls formally smoking, or this sad one of a woman nowhere, or this one of two girls in a wash basin eclipsed by a house’s shadow.
It’s sobering to realize that most of these people are dead. They lived and perhaps their only shells are on one of these pages.
This is not the first time someone has committed to restoring the dignity of photographic relics. (Susan Sontag would have enjoyed this site.) But I think there’s something restorative about looking at these images, somehow placed and replaced again.
P.S. If you want to cry, look at all of them together.