On the Road is a small-format hardcover from Hoxton Mini Press, published in 2021: 192 pages, in English, and assembled not from commissioned work but from found colour slides. The pictures come from The Anonymous Project, the archive with which the book’s editor, Lee Shulman, is associated; Tom Seymour contributes an introduction. No individual photographer is named on the publisher’s page, and that absence is structural rather than accidental — the anonymity of the makers is part of what the book is about.

What the slides record is ordinary motion: families packed into sedans, a first car photographed with visible pride, an unplanned stop at the roadside, a view opening up somewhere along a highway in Europe or America. Because the pictures were made by hobbyists rather than professionals, small failures — a thumb at the edge of the frame, a tilted horizon — sit beside moments of unexpected composure. The colours of mid-century colour film do much of the atmospheric work.

The title gestures toward Kerouac, but the wandering here is domestic and unliterary. These are weekend departures and family errands, journeys undertaken to arrive somewhere rather than to drift. Treating that modest material as a subject in its own right, instead of as a curiosity, is the book’s central editorial decision.

For a collector, the interest lies in how the volume handles a snapshot archive as a coherent body of work. The trim size keeps the plates close to the scale of the original slides, and sequence rather than any single image carries the argument. Published in the second year of the pandemic, when travel had become abstract for many readers, the plain insistence on setting out reads differently than it would have two years earlier.