Predator

Predator gathers anonymous amateur photographs from the 1920s through the 1970s that share one incongruous detail: the photographer's own shadow, falling across the frame, always wearing a hat.

Jean-Marie Donat, a collector who has spent more than twenty-five years assembling an archive of some 10,000 vernacular photographs, pulled these two hundred images from that collection on the strength of a single coincidence repeated across decades and countries. Stripped of any other context, the recurring silhouette turns from an accident of amateur technique into something closer to a stalking presence, the same hatted figure seeming to loom over unrelated subjects in unrelated decades. Innocences published the book in an edition of 500, printed and bound in Italy, with a postface by the aesthetics scholar Jacinto Lageira.

Donat has produced several other books from the same archive, each organized around a single visual coincidence isolated across thousands of found photographs rather than around a single named photographer.