“Night Lights” is an exploration in the universality of vernacular photography. The project involves writing short, semi biographical stories with images, using both found and family photos. These image are strung together like words to create narrative fiction exploring the expectations and role of women in American society.

Not just the slides and photographs themselves, but also projecting them into other spaces, and re-photographing them to alter the context of the original image.

Using places I’ve lived as settings, the people found in old photographs as actors, and the shared experiences that lie in the viewers’ memory as plot device, these sequences tell stories of growing up and being confronted with expectations of womanhood, leaving home to find yourself, happy and unhappy marriages, of loneliness and lifelong friends.

Taking a found slide purchased on eBay, digitally scanning it, projecting it, and re photographing with a film camera, I pass the image between digital and analog processes, and in and out of the past and the present. I become friends with the subject in the slides, working with them like a model to place them in a room or upon the outside of a house. Frequently, I am asking the women in the slides to stand in as me. Meant to be seen as a group of images, these projections are sequenced with the slides themselves, and also close ups of slides, in a rhythm the story can move to.

Activating a larger system of collective memory, the project simultaneously feeds on nostalgia, and also questions what we “know” about these images and the past they represent. Everyone reading it gets a slightly different version, as their particular recognition of each image type varies due to their personal experience, thus changing the story from viewer to viewer like an oral history.