An Eclectic Collection of Vintage Slides, Negatives, and Super 8’s by Unknown Photographers

Millions of photographs are taken every day, clogging up mountains of space on hard drives, to never see the light of day. I hand picked these slides and super 8 movies from thrift stores, trash piles and abandoned houses while traveling in Germany, Hungary and across the U.S. As our world is divided into places that are public and that are private, I wonder if one day we’ll see hard drives in said thrift stores, or trash piles with ‘Family Vacation’ marked on them.—Sandy Carson

Yet, By No Means is a new project by Austin-based photographer Sandy Carson that compiles found imagery. Carson has collected slides, negatives, super 8’s and prints for the past 13 years. Pulling from his archive, he selected imagery captured between the 1950s and 70s, with a few dating back to 1943.

The project reads like a nostalgic time capsule just unearthed, its contents revealing everyday moments, family portraits, vacation photos, people and places marking time. To accompany the slides, Carson put together a video of super 8 and 8mm footage he found in an abandoned house in Malibu, California that combines home and vacation movies from the 50s and 60s. Carson’s curated selection certainly has plenty to tell us, within any interpretation. The images act as reflections of ourselves, a collective identity we can all relate to on some level. And most importantly it reminds us of the power of the physical photograph, especially in the digital age.

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