The possible lives of Michele Bressan
2025 - ongoing
Over the last twenty years, I have collected vernacular photography: tens of thousands of anonymous images depicting untraceable subjects. I found them at flea markets, on discarded hard drives, through online auctions, or simply abandoned on the street, often thrown away as trash. Most of the images are dated from roughly 1980 to 2010, although the archive also includes older photographs digitized from film negatives or paper prints.
I immediately sensed the significance of this material. It was fundamentally different from the vernacular archives that are most commonly encountered, which usually document much earlier historical periods. This archive offered a glimpse into the lives of people who are temporally very close to us. At the same time, I became aware of the ethical questions surrounding the use of these images, since it was impossible to identify the people depicted or obtain their permission.
I eventually came to believe that a suited approach would be to become part of these images myself, inserting my presence through digital editing. At the same time, I began to understand why I had been collecting them in the first place: they depicted the kind of memories I was missing. In my own family, taking photographs was a rare occurrence. I have very few pictures with my parents, none from holidays, very little documentation of happy moments, and, to be honest, not many photographs of myself at all. By inserting myself into these anonymous photographs, I attempt to compensate for that absence, constructing fictional memories and imagining the possible lives of Michele Bressan.
The work is both a deeply personal exercise in projecting alternative biographies and an investigation into the mechanisms of memory, authorship, and the shifting meanings of found photography when relocated within an artistic context. I use photographs of myself from different stages of my life, from childhood and adolescence to the present day; I insert my figure into anonymous family photographs as if I had always been part of them.
variable dimensions / 46 images were displayed in IKEA frames on a metal structure measuring 200 × 100 × 60 cm within the exhibition The Image Left Reality Behind at Scânteia Plus, Bucharest 2026