Slideshow

(2024)

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Slideshow (2024), digital video, 8 minutes, Color)

Sound collage: Janie Geiser

Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins

Digital Mastering: Astra Price

 SLIDESHOW reveals moments in time in the lives of strangers. Strangers to me, but maybe not to each other. Found in a Berlin flea market in the 1990’s, these slides originated in the DDR (East Germany):an embossed DDR decorates the top of many of the vivid plastic slide frames.

The slides’ photographic images were made of ephemeral materials; the color of the images has shifted over time. But the slides’ frames have a certain graphic power, having retained their color, especially when illuminated on a light table. They frame their content: families at home, friends sharing meals, outdoor gatherings, travel—familiar photographic subjects.

Scattered among the boxed-up slides were also a few educational slides highlighting working sites, like foundries, hospitals, schools. Additionally, there seem to be a few commercially produced images of soldiers, the border—these were in cardboard slide frames and may have been produced by West German companies.

Time and place are suggested—sometime before 1989, when the wall came down. Working with the slides, I became so familiar with the people who emerged across the slides, I almost felt that I knew them. But I only know their translucent (discarded) traces.