Lost & Found in America


Selected from the Lenny Gottlieb collection of 30,000 amateur photographic prints taken in Fall 1968 at the time of the Vietnam War. These photographs – rejects from a Boston commercial photolab only a stone’s throw from the American War of Independence landmark, Bunker’s Hill – were taken at the time of the Vietnam War – a pivotal period in American history. These are simple photographs – predominantly from early ‘instamatic’ cameras – yet their stories are complex. They present ordinary life – set against the background of the extraordinary year of 1968. The points of reference have shifted, and images that began as simple, direct and personal now begin to attract other meanings, other interpretations – an image of a grandmother on a day out with her grandchildren; a woman sprawled naked on a bed hides her face from the camera; three smiling schoolgirls in matching dresses; or a youth showing off his gun – all offer up perspectives no longer mediated by the individual context originally presented through the viewfinder. These photographs retain an extraordinary intimacy – the intimacy that danced in the eyes of family photographers as they framed the everyday lives of ordinary people – as it was in New England in the Fall of 1968.




Price: £15.99
Member price: £12.80