ZieherSmith proudly presents 65 found photographs spanning the American 20th century, celebrating its conspicuous beauty and encapsulating a lifestyle of exquisite hubris, baffling habits and poetic leisure. Focusing on the eerie and bizarre found in everyday life, including odd family units, perverse couplings of awkward figures in vaguely familiar places, and solo views of predominantly male figures, the patina of the vintage prints are often enhanced by blurring caused by misfired flash-bulbs, over and double exposures, crude processing and care-worn edges. This singular grouping invites the viewer to see a crooked world through straight and narrow eyes and 65 ostensibly unrelated (and virtually untraceable) sources reinvented as a new, fleeting narrative.

Factual names, dates and whereabouts in these pictures remain as mysterious and enticing as the random, cumulative effect of each image’s unconscious formal accomplishment, but a lack of facts also enhances their allure. Artfully off-handed and off-kilter compositions, such as abrupt, spare body parts at oddly foreshortened angles, are unwittingly finessed by way of heirloom Brownies and endless Kodak mementoes.

While sometimes resembling canonical photographers such as Ralph Meatyard, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, or Mike Disfarmer, we remember that each of these photographs was taken for personal reasons altogether removed from the public realm. They are therefore crucial documents of a nature alternately anthropological and historical, but always luscious in their unorthodox and rarefied aesthetics.