I’m a collector of images, the remains of lives once captured through everyday photography. For nearly thirty years, I’ve chased these vestiges of the past, resurrecting them from flea market boxes, estate sales, and junk shops around the world. Collecting has always been an extension of my art practice. Surrounding myself with ephemera and objects gives me both comfort and creative energy. This menagerie seeps into drawings, paintings, collages, and poetic fantasies. Photographs, in particular, have always been at the center of this collection of collections; they are the core of my most treasured possessions.

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Many are antique or vintage, from times long before I was born -snapshots that feel as if they arrived from another universe. They are often small, ordinary, and ubiquitous, yet they have littered the globe for more than 125 years as testaments to personal histories. Passed through families like heirlooms, they remain precious until the memory of who is pictured fades. At some point the names and stories soften into obscurity, and eventually the language is lost. That is when these images drift into markets and into the hands of collectors like me, where they are given new narratives.

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Some of the most beautiful photographs aren’t hanging in galleries or preserved in museums but stuck to the bottom of shoeboxes or scattered across a van at the Ashby BART Station flea market in Berkeley, California. They can be found in similar markets anywhere, if you know where and how to look. A creased black-and-white snapshot of a rural house, slightly blurred, might rival the work of Walker Evans. More than that, these photographs hold an intimacy absent from most “art photography.” They were once held dear, charged with memory and feeling. Over time, something lingers on them -more than dust. You can hear the voices, feel a pulse in the paper. Living vicariously through the anonymous has allowed me to experience lives that, at times, feel more sincere than my own.

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Over time I noticed something strange. I wasn’t coming across newer, more contemporary images. Though I was a regular user of digital cameras and processes, I hadn’t fully grasped how swiftly photography as a medium had shifted. Early snapshots and negatives from the 1920s through the 1970s remained abundant. Color prints from the 1980s and 1990s surfaced sporadically, as expected. Occasionally, a handful of 4x6 prints from the early 2000s appeared. Then, almost nothing. If the flea market reflected the pulse of vernacular photography, one might conclude that amateur picture-making all but ended around 2005.

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Of course, it hadn’t ended, it had migrated. Photography was now online. Social media sites like Tumblr and MySpace, later Facebook and Instagram, had become the new shoeboxes. Images were uploaded to the cloud, endlessly shared, and increasingly curated. By then, digital cameras were replacing film, and images were saved on flash cards, SD cards, and home computers. Camera phones soon took over. Early models from Blackberry, Nokia, and Motorola produced grainy, low-light images, but this changed with the release of the iPhone in 2007. Competitors like HTC and Samsung quickly followed, and before long, the camera phone had eclipsed the point-and-shoot.

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With this migration came a rupture. Collecting vernacular photography, in the traditional sense, was dead. Pre-2000s prints would always remain in circulation, but contemporary snapshots were vanishing. The history of photography was being rewritten; polished selfies replacing the flawed and forgotten.

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Because of both social media practices and the fragile nature of digital files, today’s vernacular photographs remain hidden. Most are locked inside devices. Only the most flattering images are shared, leaving behind an incomplete record. What we see online is not the whole story. Collectors want the outtakes: the mistakes, the context, the accidents in between. We want the contact sheets, not just the finished prints.

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This realization led me to begin collecting digital storage itself. I picked up flash cards at estate sales and thrift shops. I salvaged discarded computers, pulling out their hard drives and mining them for images. I began to uncover what had been missing. Deleted photographs were everywhere -recoverable, waiting. A single SD card might contain thousands of images; a hard drive, hundreds of thousands. But even then, the archive felt incomplete.

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The true Holy Grail was inside camera phones. Many Androids, unlike iPhones, stored images directly to micro-SD cards. I began buying them by the hundreds, sometimes thousands, from recyclers and sellers online. This was when UNDELETED was born.

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From these digital excavations I have recovered and reviewed millions of photographs. Their contents veer wildly -from the commonplace to the unsettling. Babies, pets, birthday cakes, car crashes. Medical procedures, accidents, and an astonishing number of guns. That last detail, given how many of these cards come from the United States, should not surprise me, though it still does. Mostly, though, what I find is mundane yet endlessly fascinating. To scroll through an entire phone’s library is to brush against the contours of someone’s life, as close as one can get without meeting them.

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It is a form of digital voyeurism: driver’s licenses, parking tickets, skin conditions, underwear, lipstick, lovers, screenshots. Phones have become prosthetic memory, recording everything, embedding not just images but time stamps and GPS coordinates. Unlike vintage negatives, these are unvarnished documents. They aren’t curated for display, they must be mined, extracted, undeleted.

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The images in this exhibition represent only a fragment of what has been recovered, a selection shaped by what I find aesthetically and conceptually compelling. Corrupted JPEGs, blurry portraits, cracked screens, low-resolution noise, corpses, inflatable sharks. This is the new vernacular photography: undeleted.

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These are the bad selfies you weren’t supposed to see.

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-Anthony Vizzari, 2025