Golden Memories: Lee Shulman

For over eight years, Lee Shulman has been dedicated to rescuing fragments of our collective past—anonymous color slides that capture the everyday poetry of lives once lived. What began in 2017 with the chance purchase of a collection of amateur Kodachromes has since grown into The Anonymous Project, an ongoing mission to preserve the fading memories of strangers and restore dignity to all those forgotten moments. 

In the exhibition Golden Memories, presented at Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière, the artist takes his approach into new territory. The rescued photographs are transformed through a union of the ordinary and the sacred: anonymous snapshots meet gold leaf. The choice of material is deliberate and deeply symbolic. Gold, with its associations to the divine and the eternal, elevates these everyday moments—a glance, a holiday memory, a humorous pose—into something approaching the sacred.

The technical fragility of gold leaf reflects the precarious nature of colour photography itself. Most colour slides will not survive the passage of time; their chemical components fade, and with them, the stories they hold vanish. By printing these images onto gold, Lee Shulman creates a poignant tension between permanence and impermanence, between what endures and what disappears. As light moves across the surface of the print, the photographs shift between visibility and dissolution, caught in a perpetual dance of presence and absence.

This is Lee Shulman’s first exhibition at the gallery, marking a significant evolution in his practice. The artist’s works invite us to reconsider our relationship to photography, memory, and time. They call on us to pause before the ordinary in order to find something extraordinary—to honor the humble beauty of lives we will never know, yet somehow recognize as reflections of our own.

 

Allongside the exhibition, a book featuring this series is being published in co-edition by Maison CF & l’Artiere.