Strange hobbies

Continuing our series on the weird things that some people collect.

Kevin Arbuckle takes photos, but he doesn’t take them with a camera. He simply takes them – wherever he finds them. Kevin is a collector of “found photos”. Found photos are those photos that turn up in junk shops or in the hidden compartments of used furniture or lying on the floors of deserted houses. Sometimes they are picked up off the street or found discarded in photo booths. They are the photos that no-one wanted – until Kevin came along.

“I love their mystery,” says Kevin. “They have become detached from their owners. We don’t know who took them, or who their subjects are, or even where or when they were taken. They simply exist, lost in time.”

Kevin started collecting found photos three years ago and has now amassed a collection of over a thousand. “I got the idea after reading a magazine article about it. Somebody had discovered an abandoned slide collection – literally thousands of slides of this one middle-aged woman on holiday in different parts of Spain. They had apparently been taken by her husband. There was no knowing who she was, but the photos had a haunting charm. The couple seemed to have been so happy together. The photos were a kind of testament to a long, happy, although seemingly childless, marriage.”

Kevin finds most of his photos in second-hand shops, and also by trading them on the Internet. He now specialises in photos of animals. “My all-time favourite is a photo taken sometime in the ’50s of a dog in mid-air, leaping to catch a stick that a boy has just thrown. The setting is a classic 1950s American backyard. It captures something of the period. Where is that boy now, I wonder?”