Shulman: ‘For some time now, I’ve been asking myself a lot of questions about the photographs in the collection I’ve created, which essentially depict privileged white middle classes in the 1950s, a period of racial segregation in the United States. What also bothered me was that many of them contained empty chairs. Of course, it’s often the chair of the photographer who gets up and leaves his seat for the duration of the shoot. So I figured it would be great if we could put someone in that space instead, and that’s how Omar Victor Diop came to mind’