by Patty Paine
For many years, I’ve been taking photos and collecting vintage slides, photographs, and negatives. I digitized the vintage slides and negatives and posted them on an Instagram account called the “Negative Recovery Project.” I hoped to reunite these lost images with their families and rescue the people in the images from anonymity. My family’s past is shrouded in abandonment and mental illness, so my obsession with lost images probably stems from a desire to make the past knowable and tangible. While engaged in preserving these images, I also became obsessed with the idea of altering the images to both destroy and create. I used vintage images, negatives, Polaroids, and my own images as the basis for these un/re-creations. I used various processes to alter the images: everything from chemical baths, film soups, and dye infusions to burning, abrading, and cutting up and collaging the fragments. For Polaroids, I used emulsion lifting, manipulation, and transferring. I also created collages from re-creations and vintage text and images.
Click on any photo to begin the slide show.
Patty Paine is the author of Grief & Other Animals (Accents Publishing), The Sounding Machine (Accents Publishing), and three chapbooks. Her writing and visual work have appeared in Blackbird, Adroit, Gulf Stream, Waxwing, Thrush, ctrl-v, The South Dakota Review, The Common, and other publications. She is the founding editor of Diode Poetry Journal, and Diode Editions, and is the Director of Liberal Arts & Sciences at VCUarts Qatar.
SLAG GLASS CITY · Volume 8 · May 2022
Header image by Patty Paine.
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