Several could-have-been-productive hours went bye-bye on Saturday when YouTube queue-blocked me with this CBS Mornings video. It’s two weeks old, and the story itself first broke back in January, but it was new to me, and resulted in a dozen open browser tabs that I enthusiastically scrambled through. The (successfully funded) Kickstarter campaign explains the project:

In the 1980s, a bag was discovered filled with dozens of pages of color slides and hundreds of rolls of carefully labeled but unprocessed film. A picker bought it at a public auction and then sold it to a collector. The work reached two Bay Area historians in the 1980s, who meticulously began developing the film to reveal its hidden contents.

It’s been 58 years since a photographer set out to capture the first of thousands of images, but somehow, they were separated from their work. This story is compelling because over half of the film was left unprocessed; most were never seen by the photographer who made them. The work is dated between 1966 and 1970.

The developed photographs contain stunning, “culturally significant” images from seemingly every major event in San Francisco over those five years. The photographer possessed a great eye, technical chops, and first-rate access; either they were a professional with a press card, or an extremely talented amateur with a knack for being in the right place—perhaps both: with about 5,000 already developed images and 75 rolls of film yet to be processed, it’s possible, perhaps even likely, that this is the collective work of more than one person.

I found myself clicking through the project’s subreddit to posts dissecting the most minute of details as internet sleuths scrounged through archives to identify the photographer.

I love so much about this project, from the historical context to the quality of the images to the central mystery. I hope the remaining film is successfully developed and provides better clues to the photographer (or photographers), and that the photos can eventually be exhibited.