This Remarkably Ordinary Woman Took Photos With Hundreds of Celebrities—and Her Scrapbook Is an Accidental Work of Art

Everyone loves a great thrift store find, but a Belgian shop hit
the mother lode this month with an incredible 1990s-era scrapbook
documenting one middle-aged woman’s encounters with all manner of
A-list celebrities.

Among those pictured? Such luminaries as
Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie, and Kate Winslett, all
immortalized in the age before digital cameras. There’s Elijah Wood
as a child, Bruce Willis with hair, and Will Smith in a shiny green
button-down, seemingly poised to erupt into a rendition of “Gettin’
Jiggy Wit It.”

When employees at Opnieuw & Co, in a suburb of
Antwerp, discovered the photo album amid a box of donations, they
knew it was something special. “This was not something that someone
would get rid of voluntarily,” a spokesperson told Bored Panda.

The nostalgia-soaked snapshots, carefully arranged an album
covered with a pink floral motif, amount to nothing less than an
unwitting—albeit fabulous—piece of Outsider art, pairing some 200
of the world’s most famous faces with the same unassuming woman,
short and stout, her face framed with carefully coiffed, light
brown curls.

The composition for each image is simple. The woman poses next
to the famous actor, typically standing in front of a nondescript
backdrop: curtains, or a blank white wall. Almost invariably, she
offers the same cheerful grin to the camera, never seeming
starstruck in the least.

The pleasing uniformity of the photographs is what elevates it
to the realm of fine art, an absurdist masterpiece. We see the
instantly recognizable celebrities posing, again and again, year
after year, with an anonymous women in her boldly untrendy floral
dresses and patterned blazers.

But who was she, and how did she seemingly know—or at least come
into contact with—half of Hollywood?

The thrift shop posted the photos on Facebook in an effort
to identify the mystery woman and return the album. The photos,
unsurprisingly, went viral, but eagle-eyed viewers also found a
clue.

Posing with Jane Seymore, the scrapbook keeper can be seen
sporting a press badge, which identified her as Maria
Snoeys-Lagler, a member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association
who died in 2016 at age 87. The HFPA runs the Golden Globes, and
its members attend prestigious film and television events in
advance of casting their votes—hence Snoeys-Lagler’s unique access
to the stars.

Since uncovering her identity, Opnieuw has managed to track down
Snoeys-Lagler’s daughter in California, and will be sending her the
photo album. Let’s hope she in turn finds a good permanent home for
it—LACMA or the Academy Museum, are you
reading?

See more photos from the album below.

The post This Remarkably Ordinary Woman Took Photos With
Hundreds of Celebrities—and Her Scrapbook Is an Accidental Work of
Art appeared first on artnet News.