It’s the emotional implications that make found photographs so fascinating. They look much the same as the snapshots that fill our own family albums. Yet cut loose from their points of origin, they become objects of deep mystery....
These unofficial images answer a persistent need to believe that photographs can still capture some essential, unvarnished truth about the subject. Where, even before the digital era, professional photographers were often shown to have manipulated images that might appear to represent actuality, amateur photographers can still be given the benefit of the doubt. Their directness, ineptitude, and lack of artifice become signs of reliability. The taste for these pictures is a measure of our enduring hunger to experience unmediated reality.
Rick Poynor, Print magazine, March/April 2006
