found slides / origins

Found Slides: How the Collection Started

This is the older of the two found-slide pages and it is kept as it was, because people still arrive at it and because it says the thing the newer page has stopped saying plainly.

The collection started by accident, on a Tuesday, outside a building on a street we are not going to name, because the people who lived there did not ask to be in this.

What a clear-out looks like

An apartment is emptied in a day. That is the whole mechanism and there is nothing sinister in it. Someone has died, or gone into care, or simply moved somewhere smaller, and a family who do not live in the city have a weekend to deal with forty years of a life. Furniture goes first because furniture is obvious. Then the things that are clearly valuable, then the things that are clearly rubbish. What is left is the middle, and the middle is where the slides are.

A box of slides is the worst possible object to inherit. It is not rubbish, so you cannot throw it away with a clear conscience. It is not valuable, so nobody wants it. It cannot be looked at without a projector, and the projector, if it is anywhere, is in the same loft. And crucially, it is full of people you might be related to, photographed at an angle and a distance that makes them hard to identify, at events nobody living can date.

So it goes on the pile by the kerb. Around six in the evening, usually. Nobody is being callous. They have been at it since eight and there is a van coming.

We started picking them up.

Where they come from

• The kerb, during a clear-out. The biggest single source and the saddest. Whole runs arrive intact this way — a family, in order, over a decade.
• Boxes left out on stoops. A distinct category. Somebody has deliberately put these out to be taken, which is a different act from throwing them away, and we would like whoever they are to know it worked.
• Behind photo labs. Duplicates, test frames, orders never collected. These are usually anonymous in a way the domestic ones are not, and they contain a surprising number of pictures of car parks.
• Thrift shops and yard sales. Rare, and always priced, which we find funny.
• Sent in by readers. More than we expected. See the note at the foot — this is no longer happening and has not for a long time.

The catalogue numbers

Every slide gets a number on arrival. The number is not clever. The first block is the box it came in and the digit after the dash is its position in the run, so that a sequence can be reassembled after the boxes have been through a few hands. Slides that arrive singly, with no run, get a short suffix instead of a run position — those are the ones marked ss.

The numbers are the only part of this operation that is done properly, and they are done properly because a caption is a guess but a number is a fact, and we wanted there to be at least one fact.

More from the collection

Slide #0844-2

“A kitchen, mid-afternoon, with one chair pulled out. Whoever was sitting in it has stood up to take the photograph and will sit back down immediately afterwards.”

Slide #1907-0

“A man in a suit, indoors, holding a fish. There is no water anywhere in this photograph. We have looked.”

Slide #0455-8

“The christening, from the back, behind a pillar, taken by the person who arrived late.”

Slide #2110-ss

“A dog asleep on a car seat in strong sun. This is the single most photographed subject in the entire collection and we have never once been able to work out why.”

Slide #0027-5

“Somebody's whole front room, lit by one bulb, at what we would place at about eleven at night, with the television on and nobody watching it.”

What is actually lost

We should be straight about this, because the joke elsewhere on this site sometimes gets in the way of it.

When a run of slides is separated from the family it came from, the pictures survive and the information does not. The faces are still there. The names are gone, the dates are gone, the relationships are gone, and the thing the photograph was about — which is almost never the thing in the middle of the frame — is gone with them. What you are left with is a very well-preserved image of people you cannot identify doing something you cannot name, and there is no way back. That is not a small loss and it is not recoverable by any amount of good intention on our part.

Which is why archives that hold this material take the description as seriously as the object. Anyone interested in how that is actually done — how an unlabelled photograph is dated, placed and catalogued so that it stays legible — should look at the digital collections of the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs, and at the photographic holdings of the New York Public Library, which has a great deal of exactly this city and exactly these streets.

We are not doing that. We are writing captions. But we know the difference.

Editors' note