throwWay1fml via Reddit
Audio By Carbonatix
Somewhere in Denver, photographs of nine young adults are hanging in a stranger’s garage.
The tattered black-and-white images were clumsily xeroxed together, nailed to the wall, and abandoned without explanation. One year after a new resident moved into the home, they turned to Reddit to try and identify the people in the peculiar photos. Hundreds of responses quickly flooded in. In true internet fashion, the leading theory was grim.
Reddit users speculated that the pictured individuals were murdered by a prior occupant of the house, who adorned the wall with a collage of victims. They searched for the faces online, positing about missing persons reports and potential bodies buried in the backyard.
Four hundred miles away, Tyler Anderson scrolled through the conspiracy theories, knowing they were all wrong. Because he was in the mysterious photographs.
The fifty-year-old Albuquerque resident says he made the collage himself decades ago, as a student at the University of New Mexico. The photos depict members of his college friend group.
Anderson says he gave the makeshift art piece to a friend around 1997. When the friend moved away, Anderson never saw it again. That is, until he was scrolling on Reddit one morning and randomly stumbled upon the post.
“It took my brain a little while to figure out what I was looking at, to bring back the memories,” Anderson says. “It felt kind of like a dream, because it was so out of place and so unexpected. I had a sense of, ‘I think I know what this is.’ Then, ‘I think I made this thing.'”
Contrary to the conclusions of Reddit sleuths, everyone in the collage is alive and well, according to Anderson.
Anderson is featured in the center-right image. His husband is in the center-left. The man in between them is still the couple’s best friend. Some of the group members have grown into museum curators, jewelers and art collection managers, spread across states including California, New Mexico, New York and Washington, he says.
Courtesy Tyler Anderson
In college, Anderson says he made “random” xerox transfers “for the heck of it.” His work typically featured celebrities, but he made this piece after a friend took digital photos of everyone in their group. Although the photographer is unpictured, Anderson combined his photos into a collage and gifted the artwork to him.
The photographer moved to Denver sometime after graduation and brought the collage with him. Twenty years later, when he moved out of the country, he forgot the collage hanging in his garage. That’s where the Reddit poster eventually found it, Anderson explains.
To a group of former art kids, their photos being discovered in this way feels fitting. In college, Anderson says they used to hide strange art pieces in people’s homes. For example, sneaking a bad landscape painting into a party, drawing faces on eggs in a refrigerator while house-sitting, or leaving bizarrely-styled Barbie dolls in someone’s bedroom in a so-called “Barbie bomb.”
“That was the sense of humor we had,” Anderson says. “Doing mischievous art at and to each other. …[The collage] ended up being a similar act. Even though it wasn’t my intention, it had the same effect.”
Reading the Reddit replies has been a treat for the old friends, he says. Beyond the murder hypotheses, some users guessed that the people in the photos were celebrities — or a lost cast of MTV’s The Real World, as multiple commenters theorized.
Anderson was likened to Lance Bass, which he “didn’t love.” His husband was pegged as either Justin Walker from Clueless or Chris Colfer from Glee. The woman in the bottom middle was identified as Ellen DeGeneres, a resemblance that their friend group has teased her about for years.
Anderson had remained in touch with many of the friends in the collage, but for others, they hadn’t spoken in years. Being the subject of a viral Reddit post reconnected the group, he says.
“It’s as if no time had passed, even if we haven’t seen each other in a decade,” he says. “We’re kind of eternal friends.”
However, Anderson says there is one person in the collage who he does not recognize: the woman in the upper right corner.
“I’m not entirely certain who that person is,” he says. “Amidst a group of people that, to this day, we could go out for dinner and a drink and have the best time ever…there is one person that seems like maybe a stranger to the rest of us.”
It looks like Reddit has another mystery to solve.
