Has it ever happened to you? You bought an old book at the kabadi or purchased a second hand one. The pages are not only soiled with time but touch of unknown hands. Often it is the smell of old yellowing paper that will fill you. And there will be tit bits scribbled all over. Names, phone numbers, dates, addresses, sundry jottings in red, blue, black ink and then as you may turn the pages, there will be a bit of paper, a petal or a flower, a book mark or may be a photo!

Ashok Kumar buys a book (was he the one?) in Pakeezah and he finds a letter there from his lost love. It was sad, it was tragic, and it spoke of unrequited love and lonely nights in a desolate graveyard where dreams fell silent like the dead. While traveling to Bhubneshwar from home in 1998, I found a packet on the upper berth of the train. When I finally opened it, I found, Hardy’s, The Mayor of Casterbridge, several greeting cards which were mushy, flowery, full of verses and had been posted from across the seas by a woman who had a flowing handwriting. It must have been an intellectual couple! It was the first time that in a scrap of paper written neatly by the forever unknown woman, I discovered, The Great Gatsby. There were photographs too. There were school photographs and one with smiling faces completely red, pink and yellow in holi colors.

I often thought of writing on the address but never did. I got in trouble with my mother who thought they are from my boy friend. The letters, cards and photos are lost somewhere in my endless store room but I have the book. It has a thumb print. Faint contours of a long thumb with thin circular lines and next to it is mine.

Today while aimlessly surfing, I came across this website which carries photos which have no takers, no names, no dates and hence no identity. These are black and white and old. They speak of bygone fashions, styles and lives. Most I saw are of people smiling, posing and of old people. Have a look at them.

While blogging, one comes across so many blogs, which have everything except a face. Many times an idea is beautiful, a line well written, a thought quite witty and the feeling after reading it wonderful. You wonder how would be the person who wrote it. But it is an unhinged thought. And here there are endless photos but without anything to connect. Every (wo) man and every life is a book and each book is absorbing. So it is. They may be long dead, old and forgotten like Gray said unsung souls resting in unmarked graves.

I am pasting here some photos that I liked. Rest can be viewed at
http://www.moderna.org/lookatme/























Excerpts from the Homepage

LOOK AT ME is a collection of found photos.

These photos were either lost, forgotten, or thrown away. The images now are nameless, without connection to the people they show, or the photographer who took them. Maybe someone died and a relative threw away their photographs; maybe someone thought they were trash.

Some of the photos were found on the street. Some were stacked in a box, bought cheap at a flea market. Showing off or embarrassed, smug, sometimes happy, the people in these photos are strangers to us. They can't help but be interesting, as stories with only an introduction.

The LOOK AT ME project started with a few photos found by Frederic Bonn and Zoe Deleu in a Paris street in 1998. The collection now contains 572 photos.