A Sense of Someplace

With a nostalgic quality of film and a rather tilted sense of a time and place, ‘A Sense of Someplace’ is a collection of hand-made composite photographs from two origins.

Created by hand by layering two 35mm slides together in one slide mount each assemble creates a new story.  Each slide is someone’s personal record of a unique time and place, something they choose to document. When matched with another the result presents an ambiguous ‘truth’ as we still see the familiar within the distortion.

Many have a quiet anxiety. Others have an absurd narrative or a sublime beauty we might wish were reality. They all contain undertones of distortion, and often I think, suggest a meaning that is just below the surface. They are embedded in the past and seem to ask ‘do we always remember things as they really were?’.

The 35mm slides are found and given. Some I have saved from bins and some are from car boots sales. Increasingly I find them on my doorstep. I have become known as the ‘Slide Woman’ with people sending me slides from as far as Los Angeles. If you have any unwanted 35mm slides, I’m very happy to revive them.

Over the decade of working with these slides 4 narratives have emerged: Symbiosis,  Flux, Architecture and Land & Sea. There are of course many stories that reveal themselves but these four keep surfacing.

Lindsay Perth

Symbiosis Series

This Series focuses on a dynamic between humans and nature. Images can appear mutually beneficial or harmonious but in others it’s just a hostile takeover by the natural environment. There are individual portraits with nature, communal scenes and the series also has urban settings.

Flux Series

‘Flux’ because whenever I show people these ones, they always have the same response that their brain can’t settle on one narrative in the image. The story seems to move between several visual understandings and they describe it as being coaxed or falling into a tilted reality.

Architecture Series

So many slides show our fascination for human-made structures. We travel to them, we explore, we document them. This Series takes our constructions – from pyramids to gothic churches to brutalist museums – and uproots them, placing them into dubious and sometimes cryptic situations and environments.

Land & Sea Series

I have many slides that are wide landscapes of deserts, forests and mountains. These usually have meandering forms in them, occasionally someone in the distance picnicking. Here we see beguiling landscapes of places that have familiarity but the longer you look they become more and more deceptive.