iFotografiska BerlinMitte
Lee Shulman turns forgotten amateur slides from his archive of around a million into an immersive domestic landscape of anonymous family life.
A boy holds a beach ball up to the camera. His mother has her eyes shut, and the dog has lost its head to the framing. That is one slide out of about 12,000 here, all picked from Lee Shulman's Anonymous Project, an archive of roughly a million abandoned amateur slides.
Names, dates and places are gone. The slides are layered into Totems, floor-to-ceiling lightboxes standing in a completely dark room, and you walk between them like a street of lit windows at night. DOCMA's reviewer calls it the old family slide evening brought back, minus the uncle at the projector.
Take your time, and, DOCMA suggests, a magnifying glass: the slides sit so close together that the fun starts up close, with the sulking brother-in-law and the crooked wig. Half an hour gets you through it, the reviewer says, but not into it. Tickets are €15 and cover the other shows in the building, open daily until 23:00 (last entry 22:00). It closes on 1 November.
The Totems
Look for the floor-to-ceiling backlit stacks of slides that are the only light in the darkened room, each one dense with separate family moments.
The Texas family and the grey-blue Pontiac
A family of four poses in a garage beside the car, and only one red-haired boy is actually looking at the camera.
The tinsel and the car
A Christmas tree buried under too much tinsel hangs near a big car photographed more reverently than the family in front of it.
The background disasters
Get close to the lightboxes for the small catastrophes behind the subjects: a sulking brother-in-law, a crooked wig, a child doing something forbidden.
You want named photographers: every image here is an anonymous amateur slide.
Children up to 12 go free with an adult, and while Lauren Greenfield's Social Studies runs, entry is free for under-18s too.