The Archive of Ordinary Lives

Rescued slides, strangers called Ted and Vera, and why some photographs refuse to be forgotten

The skip was on the drive.

A family member of mine is an estate agent, and when he mentioned he was clearing a house and could use an extra pair of hands, I said yes without thinking much about it. I’d had some time off work and needed something to do with it - somewhere to be, something useful. The family of the woman who had lived there had already come and gone. A local charity had been and taken what they could sell. My job, such as it was, was to help with what remained.

What remained was a life. Hundreds of greetings cards. Wedding invitations. A rose, preserved carefully in a box. The accumulated evidence of a home of collectors - people who kept things because things mattered to them, and who couldn’t have known that one day the keeping of them would fall to strangers. Sentimental things. The kind that are everything to the people who hold onto them and become, in their absence, impossible to know what to do with.

And then, in among it all, boxes and boxes of 35mm slides and photographic prints. Meticulously organised. Carefully labelled. Spanning decades.

I asked what the plan was for them. The answer was gentle but clear: the family had been, the charity had come to collect anything they could sell to raise money, and whatever was left would likely go in the skip. Anything of value had already gone. Which begs the question, really, of what we mean by value. These slides will never fetch anything at auction. They have no monetary worth to speak of. But sitting on my kitchen table, holding them up to the light one by one - I’d challenge anyone to argue they aren’t amongst the most valuable things in that house.

The house felt warm. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. It felt like the home of my late grandparents - full of love and memories and comfort, the particular atmosphere of a place that has been properly lived in by people who cared about it. Moving through the rooms, you could feel the shape of two lives. The collections they’d kept, the things they’d chosen to hold onto, the care visible in every corner. It was the home of people who noticed things and thought them worth preserving. I felt, unexpectedly, completely at home.

I should say something about the family, because I don't want this to read as any kind of judgement. Grief and practicality are a brutal combination, and clearing a loved one's home is one of the hardest things there is. You cannot keep everything - I know that better than most right now, in the middle of my own clear out, preparing to move house, making the same impossible decisions about what stays and what goes. The family took what they could. That's all any of us can do. I just hope that the photographs ending up with me feels like something good coming out of something hard. That's all it is. Because they are extraordinary.

The collection documents ordinary life across roughly six decades - from the 1960s through to the 1990s, with some prints going back even further. Family gatherings. Holidays. Landscapes. Entry after entry into local flower shows and village fetes. And then the thing that really stopped me: an extensive record of European travel. Morocco. Gibraltar. Athens. Mallorca. All of it shot with obvious care and curiosity, all of it labelled in that same neat, consistent hand. These weren’t casual snapshots. They were a life’s work of looking.

Back from the orange groves

I’m digitising them on my dad’s old film scanner, slowly and carefully. Most are on Kodak cardboard mounts - the classic kind, small and slightly faded - but many are on glass, which is older still and requires a different kind of handling. Before each one goes through the scanner, I hold it up to the light. That moment - that initial hold up to the light with no idea what I’m about to see - is quietly magical. A horse and cart on a sun-bleached street in Soller. Women shopping in Palma, dressed in the fashion of another era entirely. Family groups in gardens, squinting into the sun, completely unaware they’d one day be looked at by a stranger in Somerset. Each slide is a revelation. I never know what I’m going to find.

I’m not certain who took them all - I think many were Ted’s, but I don’t believe all the photographs were made by the same person. What I do know is that the collection belonged to a couple. Ted and Vera. Their names appear throughout - on labels, in the images themselves, in the story the photographs tell. Ted passed away a few years ago. Vera passed away very recently. And though I never met either of them, when I heard she had gone, I felt sad. Genuinely sad. Because by that point I had spent hours in their home, carefully sorting through their belongings, and you cannot do that without beginning to know someone. Their interests, their humour, the extraordinary care they took with things. How much they clearly loved their family and friends.

But there is so much I don’t know. I don’t know what their jobs were, or how they met, or whether they had children. I don’t know who taught them to travel so adventurously, or what it felt like to stand in a souk in Morocco in the 1960s with a camera. I don’t know the names of the people in the family photographs, or what became of them. The gaps in the story are part of the story, and I find I’m sitting with them rather than trying to fill them. Some things you don’t get to know. What you have is what’s in the frame.

June, 1968

I’ve written before about why I photograph what I photograph. I’m drawn to communities I would never otherwise encounter - folk traditions, seasonal rituals, the ceremonies that happen in fields and village halls and on seafronts that most people never hear about. Photography, for me, is a way in. A means of access. I turn up with a camera and I am welcomed into worlds that would otherwise remain invisible to me, and I try to make something true about what I find there. What I hadn’t expected was that the same thing could happen in reverse - that I could find myself holding the work of someone I will never meet, looking at the world through their eyes, being let into their life through the photographs they left behind. Ted and Vera’s collection has given me exactly that. A way in. A world I would never otherwise have seen.

The box labelled Mallorca is the one I keep coming back to. It’s a place I love, somewhere I return to and know in that particular way you know somewhere you keep choosing. But these slides show a Mallorca I’ve never seen - early in its life as a holiday destination, before it became what it is now, still finding its shape. The horse and cart in Soller. The women in Palma, unhurried, shopping in the heat. To see it through someone else’s eyes, sixty years ago, is an almost indecent privilege. That is what photography does at its best. It loans you someone else’s attention. You borrow their curiosity, their particular way of standing in front of something and deciding it was worth keeping. Moments in history that would have been entirely unknown, entirely gone, were it not for a camera and the care to use it well.

I’ve said before that a photograph made by a human who was really there carries something that no generated image ever can. The fact of presence. The decision to look. Ted and Vera’s collection is proof of that in the purest possible form. Every slide is evidence that someone stood somewhere, at a particular moment that will never come again, and thought: this is worth keeping.

Think about how much is lost every single day. Homes are cleared, skips fill up, and with them go the evidence of lives - the photographs that nobody thought to rescue, the slides that never found their way to a scanner, the prints that ended up in landfill alongside the greetings cards and the wedding invitations and the roses kept in boxes. It happens constantly, invisibly, and most of the time nobody knows what’s gone. The ordinary lives of ordinary people - the holidays and the flower shows and the family Christmases and the European adventures - vanishing without trace because the people who loved them are no longer here to insist on their value.

October, 1963

Ted and Vera are strangers to me. I never met them, never will. But I care about their lives. I care about what they saw and where they went and the care they took to preserve it. And I think that matters - not just as an act of archiving, but as a reminder that someone always cares. That the ordinary moments of ordinary lives are worth something to someone, even if that someone is a stranger with a film scanner and an Instagram account, sitting in Somerset sixty years later, holding a glass slide up to the light.

I started The Archive of Ordinary Lives to give Ted and Vera’s photographs a home. I intend to grow it - to acquire more slides and prints over time, to give more rescued collections somewhere to be seen. I’ll take the same approach they took: slowly, carefully, with love and proper attention. These images have waited long enough.

The skip was on the drive. The boxes are on my shelf. Ted and Vera went to Mallorca, and grew roses, and kept every card anyone ever sent them, and looked at the world with curiosity and care.

They deserve to be seen.

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