For more than eight years, Lee Shulman has devoted himself to saving fragments of a shared past: anonymous color slides that hold the quiet poetry of everyday life. What began in 2017 with a chance purchase of amateur Kodachromes grew into The Anonymous Project—an ongoing effort to preserve the fading memories of strangers and to give value to moments that might otherwise disappear.
In Golden Memories, Shulman pushes this work into a new register. The rescued photographs are transformed through an encounter between the ordinary and the precious: anonymous snapshots set against gold leaf. The choice is purposeful. Long associated with the eternal and the revered, gold shifts these small scenes—a glance, a vacation, a playful pose—toward a sense of quiet sanctity.
Gold leaf is also famously delicate, and its fragility mirrors that of color photography itself. Most color slides are not built to last; their chemistry fades, and with it the stories they carry. By printing these images onto gold, Shulman creates a charged contrast between durability and disappearance, between what we try to keep and what time steadily erases. As light moves across the surface, the images seem to waver—appearing, slipping away, and returning again—held in a constant state of presence and absence.
This body of work marks a distinct step in Shulman’s practice. It invites us to reconsider how photographs hold time, how memory attaches to images, and how easily both can vanish. Above all, it asks us to pause with the ordinary long enough to see what it contains: the humble beauty of lives we will never know, yet still recognize in flashes as somehow close to our own.
