Found Photo Foundation
— experimental participatory archiving /
orphan photographs
Found photography / Archives / Fabulation / Participatory methodologies / Publishing as method
Found Photo Foundation is an artist-led platform dedicated to the collection, care, and study of orphan photographs. Photographs become orphaned for multiple reasons: they may be abandoned following the death of their owners, stolen, discarded as no longer useful, or rescued from waste streams and reintroduced into circulation.
The methodologies developed within Found Photo Foundation contrast with those of traditional institutional archives. They are experimental, situated, and informed by vernacular and queer feminist approaches to collecting and assembling images. Rather than stabilising meaning or authorship, the platform foregrounds processes of displacement, recontextualisation, and collective interpretation.
Artistic methodologies developed across different collections include transdisciplinary research, collaborative fieldwork, biographical annotation, photogrammetry, 3D modelling, experimental publishing, and installation-based practices. The archive is approached not as a neutral repository, but as a relational field shaped by circulation, loss, power, and affect.
Project unfolding
The work of Found Photo Foundation unfolds through exhibitions, residencies, publications, symposia, and pedagogical contexts. Curatorial projects such as Dear Aby Warburg: What Can Be Done with Images? and Paradigm Store have provided frameworks to survey the platform’s experimental archival practices, foregrounding provisional taxonomies, participatory tools, and speculative modes of knowledge production.
Reflective and essayistic works, including Chaos of Memories, emerge from sustained artistic engagement with orphan photography, positioning the archive as a dynamic and contested space rather than a stable historical record.
Residency-based projects, such as Torn, Folded, Curled at the Arab Image Foundation, further extend these methodologies through situated research and close engagement with existing photographic collections.
Research focus
The project addresses:
orphan photographs and post-archival memory
experimental and participatory archiving
vernacular photography and non-institutional collections
fabulation as an editorial and ethical gesture
provisional taxonomies and unstable classifications
Methodology: archive, fabulation, and publishing
The archive is activated through:
workshops and participatory labs
editorial and curatorial experiments
writing as situated practice
teaching and collective discussion
Publishing operates not as documentation, but as method — a spatial and temporal extension of the research itself.
From Practice to Manifesto
Found Photo Foundation constitutes a foundational research site within the broader msdm framework. Its experimental approaches to archiving, publishing, and collective authorship directly inform the msdm manifesto, articulating publishing as method, mediation as relational practice, and slowness as a critical and ethical stance.
Rather than resolving archival absences, the platform sustains them — working with uncertainty, fragmentation, and partial knowledge as conditions for thinking, making, and learning together.
→ Read the msdm manifesto
Forms / Outputs (selected)
Publications & editorial projects
– FPF#1 Newspaper work
– Order and Collapse: The Lives of Archives
– Dear Aby Warburg: What Can Be Done with Images?
– Orphan Editions — photobooks sourced from the Found Photo Foundation
– Reflective essays developed in collaboration with the Arab Image Foundation
Exhibitions & Installations (Selected)
– Dear Aby Warburg: What Can Be Done with Images? — Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen
– Paradigm Store — Participatory Architectures (Memory, Archive, Revolution)
– Time of Its Other (Allegories of History) — Connecting Worlds exhibition, The Drawing Room / UBM
– Timeline Vortex (Unfixed) — Born in 1987: The Animated GIF exhibition, The Photographer’s Gallery Media Wall
Workshops & Participatory Labs (Selected)
– Dear Aby Warburg: What Can Be Done with Images? — Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen
– Photobook publishing
– Page-turner
Symposia & public presentations (Selected)
– In transit: archives, belongings, and orphan images
Symposium Archives, Diasporas, and Belongings: Challenges of Photographic Research in Anthropology
14–15 May 2025, University of São Paulo (LISA–USP), organised by Fabiana Bruno
– Order and Collapse: The Lives of Archives
paula roush/ msdm mobile strategies of display & mediation
found photo foundation
archive-table installation (2007–ongoing)
Installation and infra-institutional publishing framework
presented at Dear Aby Warburg:
What Can Be Done with Images?
Dealing with Photographic Material
Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, 2012–2013
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This installation took the form of a grassroots archive-table, conceived as a working interface rather than a display. Inspired by queer and feminist vernacular archives encountered in London—particularly the Hall–Carpenter Archives and the Feminist Library—the project explored archival practice as a lived, relational infrastructure.
Using standardised shelving units and archival cardboard boxes sourced from commercial suppliers, the installation deliberately adopted institutional materials while reorienting their function. The archive housed not only the Found Photo Foundation’s raw materials—found photographs, family albums, photobooks, postcards, printed ephemera, and instructional documents—but also their ongoing reactivation through publishing, workshops, and collective handling.
Rather than stabilising meaning or authorship, the archive-table operated as an infra-institutional structure: a space where boundaries between archive and everyday life remained porous, and where images circulated through touch, conversation, and recomposition. The table functioned simultaneously as storage, editing surface, pedagogical tool, and site of encounter—foregrounding mediation as a practice of care and participation.
The archive-table established a mode of working that continues to inform msdm’s infra-institutional publishing, pedagogical protocols, and counter-infrastructural practices.
This work is discussed in Chaos of Memories: Surviving Archives and the Ruins of History According to the Found Photo Foundation, in Order and Collapse: The Lives of Archives, edited by Gunilla Knape, Louise Wolthers, and Niclas Östlind (Art and Theory Publishing / Hasselblad Foundation, 2016).
TORN, FOLDED, CURLED : FOUND PHOTO FOUNDATION IN RESIDENCY
AT THE ARAB IMAGE FOUNDATION
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Participatory Architectures (Memory, Archive, Revolution)
Found Photo Foundation
at the Paradigm Store exhibitionibition
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Orphan Editions
photobooks sourced from the FOUND PHOTO FOUNDATION
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FPF#1
Found Photo Foundation Newspaperwork
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TIMELINE VORTEX (UNFIXED)
Found Photo Foundation at the
Born in 1987: The Animated GIF exhibition
The Photographer's Gallery Media Wall
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Time of Its Other (allegories of history) / Found Photo Foundation
at the Connecting Worlds exhibition
The Drawing Room/ UBM
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Order and Collapse: The lives of Archives
The book presents the Found Photo Foundation
in the context of contemporary artistic and research-based
approaches to existing archives, the act of collecting images,
and creating new archives.
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Torn, Folded, Curled: Orphan Photographs Sourced From the Arab Image Foundation (Crafting an Archaeology of the Recent Past, One Photobookwork at a Time).
Reflective essay organised around photobooks sourced from the Arab Image Foundation photographic collections
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Dear Aby Warburg, What can be done with images?
This book presents FOUND PHOTO FOUNDATION
with recent positions in contemporary art that deal
with photographic material.
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