Photo work on racism: “It’s about the place at the table”

taz: Lee Shulman, the photos from your project “Being There” seem at first glance like snapshots from the 50s or 60s. Where do these images come from?

Lee Shulman: These are private family photos from the post-war USA. They are part of my collection of color film slides. People used to project them on the wall at home, then they were forgotten and left in boxes for decades until they fell into my hands. I work as a photographer and filmmaker, I have always been interested in different technologies. When I bought the first box of slides on Ebay, I was blown away by the quality of the images. I started buying more and more - it was like an obsession. I now have almost a million slides. I did several projects with it, including “Being There.”

Lee Shulman, born in 1973, is a filmmaker and artist who lives and works in Paris. He implemented the “Being There” project together with the artist Omar Victor Diop. It is on display at the Rencontres d'Arles photography festival until October 4th. “Being There” is part of the extensive color film slide collection “The Anonymous Project.”

taz: You selected pictures from your collection and installed the Senegalese artist Omar Victor Diop in them. How did you come up with this idea?

Shulman: The images show middle-class America in the 1950s. I come from an immigrant family from London. I looked at the photos and found them very monochrome. Those pictured are all white. That really bothered me.

taz: In the south of the United States, “racial segregation” lasted until the 1960s: blacks had to sit at the back of the bus and were not allowed to eat next to whites in restaurants.

Shulman: Yes, segregation still existed and the civil rights movement came afterwards. In the pictures there is often an empty chair where the photographer was sitting, who briefly got up to take the picture. Omar and I have been friends for many years, he is a great artist and someone I love very much. I thought it would be great if I photographed him and mounted him in the empty chairs. He is a photographer himself and also takes self-portraits. So I asked him if he would consider being involved in this project and he agreed.

taz: And how did you implement that in practice?

Shulman: As a filmmaker, I have a large team of stylists. We had to find the right clothing and accessories from the 50s. We took the pictures in the studio, with the same lighting as in the original photo. I had to find the right angle and the right lens. We worked together on the right poses. We then assembled Omar into the pictures. We did all of this without AI, just Photoshop, it was a huge technical challenge. The whole process took about a year.

taz: Can you say: By including Omar Victor Diop in the pictures, you are showing what life could have been like without segregation?

Shulman: We don't want to rewrite history. We just want to show how important it is to have a seat at the table. We are concerned with the idea of ​​being inclusive as a society as a whole. The 1950s were something like the post-war American dream. Suddenly there were all these amazing cars and people living amazing lives. But this great life didn't exist for everyone. We could have put a woman in some of the pictures, that would have said something too. The message is universal.

taz: You can see happy people in the photos. It looks like they're having a really good time.

Shulman: I think most people have happy family photos, you don't usually take photos of yourself when you're sad. Our idea was to create a family album, as if it were Omar's family. That was funny too. We tried to create something that was political and powerful, but still conveyed joy. This is not an easy task. In my work I've often tried to find that balance between humor and politics, between comedy and tragedy, because I think that makes things more accessible, more meaningful. These pictures could be of you or me, they reflect all of our lives. We've all been to the beach or had dinner with the family. They are like a collective memory. Today we live in difficult times, there is strong polarization, everyone thinks they hate someone. With my projects I also want to convey that we have much more in common than we often think.