When social media was a slide show

The mysterious allure of the Anonymous Project, by Gaby Wood

Towards the end of Le Départ, Jerzy Skolimowski’s racing car caper of 1967, a cautious young couple spend the night in a hotel. They are there for the rally to which the whole film has built up, at a frenetic pace that seems barely possible.

At the hotel, everything slows. They sit up in bed at an awkward distance, until the girl turns on a slide projector and begins to show the boy pictures from her past. As each snapshot shifts across the screen, something more intimate takes place between them than any sex scene could suggest. They fall asleep. The last slide burns and slowly disintegrates on screen. In the morning they have missed the rally but have each other.

I was reminded of Skolimowski’s underrated film while looking through Midcentury Memories: The Anonymous Project. For the past two years the filmmaker Lee Shulman has gathered colour slides from flea markets, online and elsewhere – 700,000 so far – and curated from them a collection of images that spur exactly this sort of association.

The pictures in his latest book, largely dating from the Fifties to the Seventies, are uncredited (neither photographer nor subject is ever identified) and yet as you look at them you feel let in on a secret. Each one is a fragment of something personal, cut from its context, and it’s startling to discover that despite the absence of any information beyond the moment or the frame, that feeling remains.

Though the colour is saturated and most of these photographs have the glowing quality only the late, lamented Kodachrome film could effect, Shulman says in an afterword that he hopes people will “look past the vintage nature of the images and reflect on their personal and emotional content”.

Backyards, sightseeing trips, Hallowe’en costumes, Christmas. A boy in Fifties glasses buried in the sand. A couple kissing stiffly caught by the camera’s flash.

These are the remnants of what Shulman identifies as one of the earliest examples of social media: shown in living rooms among friends gathered around a projector.

Now, transposed to anonymity by his project, each is, as Richard Woodward’s introduction suggests, like the first line in a short story – donated to our imaginations or collective memory, and designed to be held up in a different way to the light.

In one of the book’s photographs, a family of women walks through a mountainous green landscape. It’s reminiscent of an Alpine scene – the outfits look almost Tyrolean, though on closer inspection they might just be Sunday best, anywhere. The three older members of the party have their backs to us in the middle distance. The youngest, a toddler, turns to face the camera in the foreground, looking faintly amused. She is wearing a bright red cardigan and a white dress, and holds a slim branch across her body.

There’s almost nothing to this image except the lusciousness of the colour and a pleasant pastoral

Neither photographer or subject is identified – yet as you look, you feel let in on a secret

mood. But in the middle is a mark: like a bullet hole or a blind spot or (most likely, and harking back to

Le Départ) the beginnings of a burn. It makes all the difference: an incursion from the future into this one retained moment, time’s erosion asserting itself.

In the picture, the child has her life ahead of her; by the time we see it, at least 60 years later, most of her life, even in the best possible scenario, is over. The Anonymous Project allows your mind to write the story in between.

Midcentury Memories: The Anonymous Project, is published by Taschen at £40

PERSONS UNKNOWN Some of the 700,000 images collected so far by the filmmaker Lee Shulman for his Anonymous Project