Lee Shulman + Omar Victor "Being There" （Shimadai Gallery）

Lee Shulman + Omar Victor "Being There"

Starts 4/12

Artists

Lee Shulman, Omar Victor

Lee Shulman, founder of The Anonymous Project, is a London-born, Paris-based artist and award-winning film director with a background in advertising and music videos. After graduating from the University of Westminster, Lee started The Anonymous Project in 2017 when he bought a random box of vintage slides and fell in love with the window it provided into past lives. One thing led to another and people from all over the world sent him their forgotten family photos. Within a few short years he'd built a collection of 800,000 photographs and co-founded a non-profit to organise, scan, and archive it all. The Anonymous Project is now one of the world's most significant collections of amateur photography.
Omar Victor Diop was born in Dakar, Senegal in 1980. He is regarded as one of the most important Senegalese photographers of his generation. Growing up in Dakar, Diop cultivated his vivid imagination through literature and history. This led him to hone his talent in several art forms, from photography, collage and creative writing, to fashion and textile design. Since 2011, Diop has created a portfolio of self-portraits in which he embodies historical figures and fictional characters, with an aim of questioning our relationship with our collective history.

At KYOTOGRAPHIE 2025 The Anonymous Project presents Being There, a collaboration between Lee Shulman and Omar Victor Diop. Omar slips into anonymous photographs from 1950s and 1960s America - entering their world-post-war segregationist America - as if he had always been part of the setting. The performance offers a new perspective on the power of images, simultaneously humorous and thought-provoking.