In her unsettling photo collages Martha Rosler combines domestic images with snapshots of war. 60s housewives pull the blinds back on soldiers in trenches while teenagers with cell phones yammer as explosions go off behind them. The New York Times recently published a video slide show of her work.

Abner Nolan takes old found negatives and reprints them. There’s not a lot of his work online, but he did do a limited edition book with Trillium called American Negatives which looks like it might be out of print. He will have another limited edition coming out in the next year with These Birds Walk, a photo book subscription series out of Oakland.

Actually, this just in. Todd Wemmer over at Lost and Found Photos stumbled upon a collection of Nolan’s found meat photos in Issue 2 of Meat Paper, a great foodie journal about the “meat zeitgeist.”

And while you’re visiting Lost and Found Photos, take a look around. It’s one of the best resources for found photography.

Discovered this genius of a site by way of the blog “It’s Nice That.”

The Lion publishes one found photo a day accompanied by a song. The owner Arian Behzadi describes it simply as: “For when a song fits a picture or when a picture fits a song.”

Found photos invite us to dream up narratives and giving them a soundtrack is the perfect way to paint immediately and without words a mood and a story. Schoolgirls skip rope caught in mid-air to the hopping beat of Port O’Brien’s “I Woke Up Today.” The view from a train window unreels to the slow melancholy of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here.”

This image of two teens dancing pairs up with David Bowie’s “Heroes.” The lyrics “I will be king and you will be queen…just for one day” seems to fit this photo perfectly—two awkward teens frozen in a dance move, eyes locked, goofy and ecstatic.

New snapshots and new music pretty much every day. You have to open the link to the song in a new window.

We tend to think of found photos as existing solely in the physical world, pieces of paper from the past covered with chemical emulsion and unknown faces, but the Internet opens up a whole new universe of vernacular photography where the images are less tangible, more ephemeral and free from the bonds of ownership. It’s a vast community-owned pool of pictures.

Sites are springing up that recognize this. As Found is an online gallery that curates groups of photos around themes. This image is from a group called Presidential runner-ups—a sad collection of all the also-rans in US history harvested from the Web. Other sets include handshakes, mechanical parts, albinos. Humor runs through all of these with a chuckle at our own banality. As the owners of the site declare: “Finding is creating.” Recognizing a pattern and naming it gives these images a previously unowned significance.

And take a look at Many Same and Secretly Creepy, too.

Salvadoran artist Victor Cartagena’s latest installation, Invisible Nation, fills the walls of Galeria de la Raza with swarms of official Latin American ID photos, many of them passport pictures from the 70s and 80s, thousands of nameless faces that impress with sheer numbers, but also make it seem necessary to look more closely at each of these singular individuals and imagine their story.

For Cartagena, these masses are the reality of immigration so often forgotten in political discussion. Faced with this tidal movement of lives across borders, he insists that identities must be made out within the crowd.

Images are multiplied throughout the gallery. Video loops of faces play on the walls. Armies of photos are tacked with sewing pins to one broad expanse. Boxes covered in brown butcher paper sit in various corners of the gallery looking like so many drug bundles. The front of each package carries someone’s photo, as if all of these lives are parcels to be trafficked.

Cartagena turns tea bags into gauzy envelopes, wrapping each photo in a cottony haze. He then gathers these packets into bunches of 10 or 20 and hangs them from the gallery ceiling. The immediate impression is one of weight, a forest of ponderous hanging cords. A barely audible whisper emanates from somewhere overhead. I don’t speak Spanish, but the few words I can make out are “tristeza más tristeza.” Sadness more sadness.

Cassandra C. Jones weaves mundane found photos into intricate floral tapestries. She takes images of cheerleaders in mid-cheer, hands and legs flying out in a whirlwind of exuberant gestures, and diffuses all of that overeager, adolescent energy into beautiful pinwheels of color and form. It takes a close inspection to see the details of what at first just looks like beautiful wallpaper.

In another series, she re-imagines an icon of kitsch—the pink lawn flamingo—into what appears to be exotic tropical orchids.

She’s also created what she calls snap motion re-animations, flipbooks really, for which she gathers hundreds of clichéd postcard images—sunsets, moons, soaring birds—then transforms them into stop-motion animations where suns and moons rise and set and birds take flight.

Bertien van Manen is a Dutch artist whose work is on display at Yancey Richardson in New York.

The current show features images from her travels across Russia, where she photographed people she befriended in the intimacy of their own home. Her style is an intriguing mix of documentary and personal.

Van Manen has an earlier series called “Give Me Your Image” which immediately caught my eye. During her travels all over Europe, she began staging images in people’s houses, selecting a family photo, an image dear to someone and shooting it in the context of their bedroom or entryway, posed on a dresser top or kitchen table. Pictures within pictures. Scenes within scenes. The physical proof of an intangible emotional connection to another person.

I’ve often wondered if memories were qualitatively different before photography was invented. When a loved one dies we have the crutch of a family snapshot to remind us of details that without the photo might become cloudy.

The online photo magazine, Lens Culture featured the work of Ludmila Steckelberg recently, a Brazilian artist who doctors her family photo album, blacking out the shapes of those relatives who are no longer alive. It rings of those found photos where a person is cut out or torn away, an arm wrapped around a shoulder or hip the only trace of this vanished person.

But Steckleberg’s images are of loved ones, so to forcefully block them out is a painful memory exercise. If we could no longer see their physical features in a photo, how would we remember them, what would we remember?

Kimberly Austin’s images waver and blur on silk and muslin banners. Her technique involves developing the same image on two different swaths of textile, using two distinct alternative processes. She prints one sheet of fabric using cyanotype and the other using Van Dyke then hangs both layers of material over a metal rod so that the Prussian blue of cyanotype and the rusty brown of Van Dyke line up, creating an inky image.

This piece, “Contra Natura,” organizes images of people and things like numbers on a bingo card or reels on a slot machine, insinuating a sense of blind luck, of random and multiple arrangements. A boy ends up between an antique brush and a gun, a child seated on a chair is flanked by a baby doll and a toy car. Domestic beauty on the left, force and speed on the right and in between a person.

Austin’s choice of images and groupings, forces us into stereotypical assumptions about gender, but the grid-like structure also allows the viewer to imagine rearranging these objects to come up with a different pattern.

Gerald Slota traffics in fairy tales and mysteries. His images are often blurry, fleeting, difficult to read, the surfaces riddled with cuts, lines, tears, childish doodlings.

Slota manipulates his negatives, drawing on and scratching them, laying shapes over the negative to obscure or embellish the image while he’s printing. Looking at his pictures is like walking into a ghost story.

He’s done a whole series called “Found” in which he builds his own new universe on the surface of other people’s pictures. Unknown figures smile and pose patiently, unaware of the new chaotic stories that now swirl over their frozen image.

His manipulations are a way of engaging in a story in which he has no part. Who are these people? Slota reduces them to primal symbols. In this trio, Slota’s etching charges the scene with new meaning. The triangular stick figure dresses of the two women, turn them into a child’s rendering of a mother or sister. The man in the middle with his claw-like hands wields wiry lightning streaks that slice across the milky blur of the women’s faces. Above them a picture of a simple flowerpot is reduced to its essence, captured in a few lines.

As observers of old photos, most of us might dream up our own momentary interpretations. Slota commits them to paper, creating physical, primitive portraits.