VO: On one of the windiest days of the year in New York City, I followed a trail of kodachrome slides to a trash bag filled with thousands of them. I thought maybe there’d be an interesting story behind them, so I recorded myself picking them up, and sent a clip to my editor. She was intrigued. So, we went live on Facebook. That’s me. DEB: “Hi, I’m Deborah Acosta, a journalist with The New York Times. I found something kind of crazy walking down the street. They’re actually really, really beautiful photographs. Let me show you guys.” VO: It wasn’t long before people started commenting. DEB: “So, this was just lying on the ground here.” VO: People projected all sorts of meaning into the slides. DEB: “On 43rd and 11th avenue. And I followed it to this trash can. ” DEB: “This random city trash can.” VO: And some people thought they were meaningless. DEB: “And I found this bag on the ground, filled with beautiful kodachrome slides. And I just can’t imagine why someone would throw all this stuff away. ” COMMENT: This is amazing. COMMENT: They were placed next to the tarsh to be picked up by someone who could see its value! COMMENT: A dead man’s belongings discarded by his family, probably. COMMENT: It’s weird you are going through the trash COMMENT: Just throw it back in the bin, it’s rubbish. COMMENT: I always rescue things like this, it’s like a life lost, and it always makes me sad! COMMENT: Is this really ok regarding privacy? COMMENT: Someone will undoubtedly throw my slides away when I die. COMMENT: Nothing more tragic than family photos tossed into the trash. COMMENT: As a former columnist for the St. Petersburg Times, I cannot imagine my editors would have ever approved a trash hunt for a story, live or not. DEB: “You never know, this might be an interesting story, John. I know, it’s live, we don’t know, it might be nothing at the end of the day, or it might be something really cool. We don’t know, that’s the point, it’s live.” VO: And then a clue. DEB: Ah, this says: Mariana Gosnell? COMMENT: I read her flying book. It was great. DEB: And an address. COMMENT: Mariana Gosnell, 79, of New York City and Treaty Island, died suddenly on March 23, 2012. DEB: And I’m not sure what that says. Does anyone know who Mariana Gosnell? COMMENT: She worked for many years at Newsweek, where she reported on medicine and science. VO: A few people quoted Gosnell’s obituary. COMMENT: She then wrote two well-reviewed books, Zero Three Bravo, about traveling cross-country in her small plane and later ICE, which led her north of the Arctic Circle and to the South Pole. VO: She was a journalist and author. Could she also be the photographer? And why was this video resonating with so many people in the comments? I figured, once I looked inside the bag, I might as well follow the clues and figure out who it belonged to, and see if there was a story. So I enlisted the help of one of my colleagues. Todd Heisler. Pulitzer Prize winning, New York Times photographer. DEB: Some people were very excited about this find, and others thought there was no importance whatsoever to something like this. COMMENT: Such serendipity! This is such an exciting treasure hunt... And it shows that people can unite to try and solve a common mystery of interest.. DEB: What are your thoughts on that? COMMENT: Why would they be thrown out to a waste bin on a busy street? That is a mystery in itself. TODD: I think it’s all important, because, look at that right there. It’s a life, or at least it’s a fragment of somebody’s life. It was important to them. COMMENT: I agree with Todd. It’s important cause it’s a fragment of life and we’re given the chance to put together a story that will be dear to someone! TODD: Is it gonna hang on a gallery wall? I don’t know. But, does that make it important or less important? No. I mean, that’s a beautiful, beautiful picture. COMMENT: Someone buying a derelict storage locker would have ditched this kind of stuff assuming it had no value DEB: So Tony Devito thinks maybe somebody buying a derelict storage locker would’ve ditched this kind of stuff, assuming it had no value. Do you think that’s a good hypothesis? TODD: Yeah, because one of the comments said there’s a storage place nearby. DEB: Yeah, I can definitely confirm that there is a storage place right across from where I found these. TODD: Yeah, if they have no personal value for somebody, what are you gonna do with these? VO: As we dug through the images, adventurous scenes unfolded before us. Antarctica, Kenya, model planes flying through the air. And a woman. We saw her again and again. Could this be Mariana Gosnell? Now that we had a sense of what we were dealing with, I decided to make some phone calls. DEB: “Hi Jamie, this is Deborah...” VO: I was determined to do all of my reporting live, so that the audience would be a part of it. DEB: “I found a bag filled with kodachrome slides...” VO: First I left a message with Mariana’s partner, Jamie Fenwick, who was listed on her obituary. I tried a few more, including her siblings, but no answer. Then: DEB: “Scott Gosnell, 45 years old. I wonder. Ok I’m gonna try this number.” “Hello, hi! So I just want to let you know I’m live on my Facebook account. Ok wonderful, is it okay if I put you on speakerphone?” SCOTT: “Yeah well she was a journalist. She worked for Newsweek for many years. COMMENT: This gets more and more interesting! SCOTT: And then she was also a writer. And she had 2 published books” DEB: “And do you know if she took photographs herself? Would she bring a photographer with her?” SCOTT: “Oh yes, she was also a really good photographer.” DEB: “Oh wow. So I think I may have found her slides. These were just like COMMENT: See if you can encourage her nephew to come on live to talk about the photos and his aunt. DEB: sitting on a corner next to a city trash can in New York City.” SCOTT: “Hmm, that’s mysterious.” DEB: “Isn’t that mysterious?” SCOTT: “Yeah. The only thing I can think is she myst’ve at one point had a storage space in that building. COMMENT: The shoes that were in the bag might be a clue. Perhaps her partner, Jamie Fenwick, or another man found or acquired the slides and subsequently decided they no longer had an interest in them. SCOTT: Whoever was keeping that space may have let it go. And the people who ran the storage space may have thrown out some of her stuff. ” VO: So it seemed Mariana Gosnell was our photographer. [Now that we knew who our photographer was,] I wanted to learn more about her, and ultimately, solve the mystery of who left the slides on the curb, 4 years after her death. So I met with her good friend Cage, who reached out to me when she saw the live video on Facebook. CAGE: “I was shocked to see her beautiful photographs in the trash, and so many years after her death. The minute I saw the slide of the plane that you held up very early on, and when I saw her handwriting, I almost cried. I said: Oh my god! It’s Mariana! And that was before I saw the envelope that said Mariana Gosnell.” “After my intial horror, because I was horrified that they were in a trash bag, with dog pee and coffee cups and god knows what all, I was so happy that they’d been liberated. Set free like, Mariana loved birds. She was a big bird watcher, and she always used to participate in the bird count in central park. And so they were like little birds or like little airplanes flying around. It was the right thing to happen to them, instead of being confined to landfill somewhere. VO: As I chatted with Cage, a picture of Mariana began to emerge. She was curious. She was passionate about passionate people. She found the beautiful in the mundane. She loved flying her plane. But what would she think of all this? CAGE: “First of all she would say: Wow! That woman at the Times, good for her! Fantastic! She’s down there on the ground, picking up this stuff with the dog pee! You know, and she’d be a little bit embarrassed about the attention. But I think that much as she wouldn’t like the attention, she would be so tickled at the mystery of it, and the lengths to which you went to find out about her. And that ultimately she would really be pleased. And because this place and this work meant so much to her, I think she’d be absolutely horrified that it was in a wastebasket. VO: So who could’ve put them there? As I researched Mariana,I came across a New York Times review of her last book, ICE, the review was written by the journalist Elizabeth Royte. Who, coincidentally, it turned out, is the author of a book all about trash. LIZ: “So my book is called Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash. Yeah I’m pretty sure that those slides would’ve ended up at an incinerator in Newark. Household goods aren’t supposed to be put into in corner litter baskets, and someone could’ve been fined. Whoever placed all that stuff there.” I mean, trash doesn’t tell the whole story, but sanitation workers say they can kind of guess people’s lives from what they’ve set out. They can tell if there’s been a divorce in the household, if someone has died, if someone is cross-dressing, or if someone had a baby. In vino veritas, you know, in the grape... in wine is truth? Haha. When you drink too much, and spill all the beans. So maybe, in Discards Veritas. DEB: In Discards Veritas. I like that, that’s interesting. VO: So where would we find the ultimate truth behind Mariana’s slides? The answer it seemed, lied with her partner of 32 years. Jamie Fenwick, who reached out when he got my voice message. JAMIE: We were close. We were in love. VO: It turns out, that Jamie left the slides on the curb. He was downsizing a storage space he had shared with Mariana. JAMIE: But we had an overload of one bag of extra stuff, and it would have cost more to put that in the dumpster. So I—at the end of a very, very exhausting—physically exhausting and emotional day, pruning the storage locker, one can imagine, physically hard but also emotionally going through stuff. Ah, I put this bag of what I knew to be slides in the public trash on the sidewalk. And I thought well they’ll pick it up tonight and that’ll be it, and if worse comes to worse, someone will see these and think they’re of no value and ah, move on. VO: I wanted to learn more about their relationship, so I asked him to look through some of the slides. JAMIE: One of them is Mariana, my god she had great legs! Holy shit. I knew that of course, but... there’s she and her mother with her plane. She had an eagle, a goshawk painted on it. She took pictures of geometric patterns from the air. Stunning ones, stunning ones. She was fascinated by these patterns. Things she hated: self-pity. Crows she hated. She hated loud neighbors, she hated cooking. She hated dogs peeing on the sidewalk flowers. She hated cleaning. She hated unfairness. Things she loved: birds, old fleamarket hankies. Elephants, airplanes, tea, she loved canoeing, she loved serendipitously sketching people at le Pain Quotidien. And she was always thinking of the next story, she saw stories in everything. That’s why she would’ve recognized your story as a story immediately. She would’ve pursued that, she would’ve turned that into a print story. VO: So how would her story have ended? The question burning in my mind was: why? Why did he leave these slides on the corner. JAMIE: There was no deeper thought although if you happen to be a psychiatrist or a deep thinker, you might say: oh he subconsciously wanted these to be discovered. I think that’s not the case. Some things there’s just no explanation, period. VO: So Jamie left it up to our interpretation. I thought about some conjectures that people had made in the commetns during the discovery. COMMENT: Beautiful reminders of a loved one can often prove to painful to hold onto if they leave us. JAMIE: It’s a mystery, it’s a mystery why this happened. It’s a mystery. You can call it magic if you wish, but I call it a mystery. COMMENT: It is kind of sad that what used to be treasured is now trash. But sort of circle of life, isn’t it? [This woman, who recorded the audio for her comment while she was at her son’s high school graduation, wrote something over email that has stuck with me since: I’m at my son’s HS GRADUATION, taking some pictures that are priceless to me now, but will probably be deleted in the future. A parallel it could be, don’t you agree?] VO: These fragments of life were discarded, left behind. Almost lost. Forever. Which, let’s face it, each of us, all our photos will someday be forgotten too. Until, someone finds them. And maybe, the most important thing we all leave behind is the way we made other people feel while we were here. JAMIE: The best thing I’ve done is to have loved well, and to have been loved well in return. That’s the best accomplishment of my life.