The Object Not Found website is basically a collection of found photos, notes and other ephemera, started in late 1997.

From Damien Frost, the creator … I seem to have this uncanny knack for finding discarded photos and notes and like a lot of other people, once i’ve picked up these things to examine in passing i find it hard to throw it away again, as if by finding it you have gained some sort of responsibility over the object and if indeed it was originally accidentally lost you feel you should by finding it, at least give it a good home. My good home used to be a mantlepiece or a shoe box, until one night while browsing the web i came across an “error 404 Object not found” message and it got me thinking about all these “lost” web pages that are not “found” and how it might be analogous to all these real world pages/photos that i have actually found.

I’m not interested in the inherent value of the object itself but rather i’m more interested in presenting these things in a different context than originally intended. And i don’t neccesarily mean that they are now these digitally presented and preserved entities, but rather their audience and by extension their meaning has significantly changed by their presentation on the web. One of the things i enjoy most about finding photos is attaching a personal meaning to them. I don’t think we can help but try to do this when we look at a found image. Whether we are trying to determine the relationship between the subjects in the images of family snaps or trying to work out just why a seemingly random or mundane image was deemed worthy of posterity in a photo. But really there’s no telling. And this fascinates me, especially in the context of art where we’re often handed down definitive meanings especially by art critics of what’s going on in an artwork or photo that can often leave little room for the viewer to attach their own meaning to a work.

Tags: audience, found objects