Paintings from Stolen or Found Photos
About thirteen years ago I bought an anonymous person's snapshots from Costco. At that time you could go up and buy anyone's photos you liked. I looked for ones that have been there a long time (2 months) and that had a double set of prints. I went to my car and took the second set of prints out, which I kept. I took the envelope with their negatives and first set of prints back to the racks so they could buy them. I used the snapshots as a source for my paintings. At first I had the intention of doing the paintings really quickly, taking snapshots of the paintings, and putting them back in the original photo envelope at Costco so the customer could have the photos of the paintings as their second set. I started to do this but the CEO of Costco happened to see my paintings in a show and changed the procedure of submitting film for processing, so I was never able to get the snapshots of the paintings back to the customer. I could still do my project when I visited a Costco far from the ones in the Seattle area, I did this once more on Maui. Now all the Costco's have made this impossible, perhaps partly because of my influence.
The original stolen photos from Costo |
Prom pictures stolen from Maui Costco |
Roll of film found in Zion National Park |
A portable museum |
Last pictures taken by an evicted household |
A retired policeman's pictures from Yahoo |
Film abandoned at a photo development kiosk. |
A roll left in a car after break-in |
A roll of film from the WTO protest in Seattle, 1999 |
Children's photos from a road trip lost in the bushes |
Found photos of Las Vegas |
Google search for nude hippies |
A roll of film left in a party house by expelled students. |