When We Were Young gathers colour slides that were never meant to be seen outside a living room. Lee Shulman, a filmmaker and the founder of The Anonymous Project, spent years accumulating roughly 800,000 of them from members of the public, and this book, published by Hoxton Mini Press in 2020, selects from that trove. The photographers are unknown; the pictures were made by families recording their own holidays, outings and small ceremonies.

The subtitle fixes the territory: memories of growing up in Britain between the 1950s and the 1980s. Cars parked beside picnic blankets, ice creams at the seaside, children in paddling pools, a baby taking a first sip of stout. Nothing here is documentary in the reportorial sense. The images are amateur in the exact sense of the word, and their hold lies in that. They feel unfamiliar and, at the same time, entirely known — closer to a relative’s long-lost album than to an exhibition print.

Shulman edits rather than photographs. His work is to choose, sequence and frame material whose authors cannot be named, and the book’s arrangement, its rhymes between one family’s afternoon and another’s, is where the authorship really sits. Lucy Davies contributes an introduction, and The Anonymous Project supplies the archive from which the pictures come.

For a collector, the appeal is partly historical. The colour slide was a fragile, domestic medium, and the culture that produced these pictures has largely gone. A hardcover of 192 pages, in a format of roughly 21.5 by 16.4 centimetres, this is not a monumental object but a deliberately intimate one, and it asks to be read as an anthology of ordinary life rather than as the work of a single hand. What it preserves is a collective record, made by people who never expected an audience — which is also what makes it moving.