Unique Photographs

Unique Photographs is Fred Cray's 2013 book documenting an ongoing project of the same name. Since 2008, Cray has left more than 26,000 one-of-a-kind photographs in public places around the world for strangers to find.

Each photograph in the project is a single print, made once and never reproduced. Cray places them in a city street, a park, or another public spot, sometimes hidden and sometimes left in plain view. He has scattered them across the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South Africa, and tracks many of the drops through an Instagram feed tied to the project. He also makes additional unique photographs specifically for the book editions and exhibitions that document the work, this volume among them.

Cray was born in 1957 and is based in Brooklyn. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a Pollock-Krasner award soon after. His work is held by the Brooklyn Museum, the George Eastman Museum, the New York Public Library, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and he is represented by Janet Borden Inc. He has extended the Unique Photographs project through further self-published books, including Changing the Guard (2014), Conversations (2014), and Silhouettes (2016).