Mystery happy snaps offer collectors a taste of other people's memories She holds a silver pistol in her right hand, cocks her hips and grips the trigger. It's hot outside and she casts a long shadow on the lawn. Behind her are the power lines and the red rooftops of the suburbs. She couldn't be more than 12, with curly hair and pale skin poking out of white socks and a red cowgirl costume. Who she is and why she is posing for the camera in a big hat and tassels are unknown. Where did she live? Was she going to a birthday party? Was she happy? Looking at her is like peering over the back fence at strangers. The cowgirl's image was among about 4000 photographic slides found in two cardboard boxes at a Sydney market. Her photo was dated 1961. We might guess it's summer by the leaves drooping on the trees. But she is not alone. There are millions, perhaps, of anonymous family photos like hers, abandoned or lost by their original owners and now for sale at markets, garage sales or online. Intimate photographs of parents, sons and daughters at play now belong to people who never knew them. Some collectors like the mystery of these images, while others hang them on their wall like strange ancestors. There has long been fascination with black-and-white portraits from the 19th and early 20th centuries, but these are photos from recent decades - more personal histories than public ones. "Every now and then I try to find a clue of who they may have been," says photo collector and online retailer Steve McInnes. They're a snapshot of something that will never be again. It's a link to the past. He found the cowgirl among the thousands of photographic slides of her unknown Australian family on holiday. The photos follow them through the 1960s and '70s, from their backyard in some anonymous city to the Kingaroy Post Office, to Melbourne's Moomba Festival and beyond: to Bahrain and Norway, a health spa in Switzerland, street markets in London and a luau in Hawaii. McInnes wonders if the parents were diplomats, based on the breadth of their travels. One of his online customers has collected about 500 images of the family. "He has built almost this history of this other family as they travelled across Europe, from the time when they were little kids to their late teens," McInnes says. The buyer, who does not want to be identified, confesses a certain nostalgia for the past. Some photographs, he says, "echo the buyer's own memories of early family life and travel." Dr Marcus Bunyan, of the University of Melbourne's arts faculty, says found photos might give collectors a sense of belonging, despite the fact that the people in the images remain unknown. They eat ice-cream and play in backyard swimming pools. They are so perfectly ordinary they could be anyone's family, even yours. "It's like looking over somebody's back fence and seeing how they lived," Bunyan says. He once bought an old photo album on eBay filled with images of an unknown aviator in World War II. There he is with friends in California or in the air over Italy. In one blurred photograph, the young man smiles and waves at the camera from the cockpit. I look at him and wonder: What did he do with his life? Did he marry? Have kids? Is he still alive? You make up all these stories of the images you find," Bunyan says. I have no photos of me before I was 17. They were all lost and I feel a sense of longing and a connection to these people. It's like we become the custodians of these images. The 2004 documentary Other People's Pictures revealed dozens of collectors sifting through photos at New York's Chelsea Flea Market. Among them was Drew, whose mother had joined a cult and destroyed all their family photos when he was a teenager. He re-creates family albums with photos of strangers. Another collector says his friends think his collection is strange. They thought it was stealing part of another person's past. In Sydney, Rozelle Markets stall-holder Steve Collison says some buyers see other people's photos as social history, of a location at a point in time or of the fashions of the day. "One guy comes in every week buying old portraits and calling them 'instant ancestors'," he says. Looking at such photographs is a form of "permissible voyeurism," says Australian Centre for Photography assistant curator Belinda Hungerford. They're not private any more. They're in the public arena now. There's a mix of sadness that they have been discarded because they are personal - they are private and they are thrown away for strangers to look at. There's a bit of mystery as well. You can imagine a life for them, or imagine yourself into that life. The people in these photos pose and smile, typically. They look as if they are having fun. It's a nostalgic world. Yet there's something eerie about them. Some are no doubt dead. They're phantoms. Hungerford wonders whether such collections will survive the age of digital photos. People aren't really printing out their photos any more. Maybe photos later than the 1990s won't be around. She refers me to photographer and collector Michael Waite, who works at the centre for photography. When we meet later he shows me a black-and-white portrait of a young man and woman standing in the grass in their swimmers, which he bought on eBay. The man holds the woman and looks at the camera. Her face is blurred. "The fact she is obscured in the shadows brings in some mysteriousness," Waite says. I accept the mystery. The world doesn't make sense. He shows me photos of a family standing outside a white, barn-like house, of a Japanese man standing in a garden, of three young German boys sitting on a bench in uniform. When I look at this I think how they were living their lives in an era that defined them ... What is going to happen to all our photos when we are gone? What is going to happen to all that stuff? Do you recognise anyone in these photographs? Email peter.munro@fairfaxmedia.com.au