When Life Looks Like a Wes Anderson Movie

Perhaps most amazing of all, Mr. Anderson has blessed the project and, it seems, been inspired by the idea of doing a little adventuring himself. As the director writes in his foreword, “The photographs in this book were taken by people I have never met, of places and things I have, almost without exception, never seen — but I must say: I intend to.”

Mr. Koval, 36, a former content marketer, initially spotted locations that looked as if they could be in a Wes Anderson movie on a subreddit in 2017. He reposted the pictures to his personal Instagram as visual notes for his own travel intentions.

He has tried to maintain the sense of shared visual language and discovery, even as the Instagram feed has blossomed into a brand of its own. “I have lost count of the amount of times my friends have said, ‘Oh Claire, that’s so Accidentally,’” said Claire Walker (@thesilvercherry), a London careers adviser who discovered the account, accidentally of course, in 2017. “I think I can safely say that I was taking Accidentallyesque photos before I discovered the AWA platform.”

What makes an Accidentally photo? Steeples, lighthouses, theaters, wedding-cake hotels, outdated technology and, most predictably, the color pink, so rarely seen in typical architectural discourse.

Matt Zoller Seitz, New York magazine’s television critic and the author of two books on Mr. Anderson’s work, said he believed that the Instagram feed helped to fill a gap.

“One of the things I constantly harp on in my criticism is I wish more film and TV critics would pay attention to form as well as content,” he said. “The Wes Anderson fan base is interested in both, and they understand the filmmaker’s style and personality so well they can be walking around out there in the world and say, ‘Oh that looks like a Wes Anderson shot.’”