Found Photography: Pictures of People Standing Next to Their Televisions

Our senior art critic Jerry Saltz has long known the artist Oliver Wasow — the two met in the ‘80s, when Wasow used to run an art gallery in the East Village. These days, Wasow has become more well known for his humorous and playful found photography, which has drawn a sizable following on social media, where he shares images he has discovered across the Internet. Wasow used to go deep-diving in libraries and physical archives, but as more and more material has become digitized, he’s enjoyed a certain amount of freedom and immediacy that he has never experienced before. “Pinterest has really changed things,” Wasow explains, “I follow hundreds of people who have similar interests to me. Archives can now be exponentially shared. Often it’s difficult to trace the origins of the image — in theory, when someone pins something from someone else’s Tumblr, that is then linked back to its source, but in reality it almost instantly gets severed from its origins. I kind of like that, that ownership is almost impossible to trace.”

This week, with the arrival of the holidays, SEEN will feature three slideshows showcasing Wasow’s eye. First up, we present people standing next to their televisions.