Filthy Pictures

Well, that got your attention, didn't it?!

As you can see, though, I'm not talking about those filthy pictures. I'm talking about literally, physically dirty and corrupted slides.

I'm almost finished posting all the scanned slides from my first two batches to Flickr. You can see them here. The album has 181 pictures in it as of early this morning, and I think I have about 20 more to go. Two hundred images is a nice round number, though it's bigger than I'd ideally like a Flickr album to be, so I'll start a new one for future scans.

On Monday I began sorting yet another bag of slides that I bought as part of this haul. It definitely contains work by the same photographers whose images I've already been scanning. Some of the people and locations in the pictures are the same. They're like old friends at this point!

I ran into numerous photos that are pretty badly damaged. They look like they got wet, which caused the emulsion on the slides to degenerate and even grow mold. Maybe they were stored in a damp garage or maybe someone had a flood at home.

I began putting them in the trash pile, but then, as I found more, I noticed how cool they look. I remembered Linda Sue saying that accidents can be fuel for art, and in a way these are accidents -- of storage, rather than photography skill. I especially liked that picture above of Corfe Castle and the Greyhound Inn (which is still in business). It almost looks like a painting.

Here are some more slides that were pretty heavily damaged by dampness. The images are all from the mid-'80s to the early '90s, from what I can tell.

There is an artistry to them, isn't there? Be glad you don't have to touch them, though. Believe me, in person, they are pretty nasty.

I wound up pulling them out of the trash and setting aside these favorites. I don't know if they'll continue degrading or if they're stable now that they've dried out, but I sure don't want any residual mold to spread to the other slides, so I'll store them in a separate plastic baggie. Kind of mesmerizing, aren't they?

Anyway, I got through that whole bag -- probably about 1,200 slides -- and as before, I looked at every image and tossed about 2/3 of them because they were boring, flawed or both. I then had to go through the discards a couple of times to pull out the damaged ones above, because I'd belatedly decided to keep them, and to make sure I hadn't made any sorting mistakes.

I'm now down to a few hundred slides, and I will clean, scan and post the best of those over the next couple of weeks. And then two more bags to go!