Luther Price (slide projections)

Narrator: The large-format slides you see projected here were made by the filmmaker Luther Price. Price works with found footage, which he manipulates physically. To make these slides, Price begins with strips of film—often his own outtakes. He wedges them between pieces of glass, often including other elements–sometimes insects, dust, hair, or collapsed bubble wrap. He frequently allows controlled imperfections to emerge, such as air bubbles between the pieces of glass.

Luther Price: Like little collage pieces.

Narrator: Luther Price.

Luther Price: I get just as much enjoyment out of working this way because you are working just with a still, and sort of creating sort of a collage or almost, I feel, like a painting sometimes.

Narrator:  Sometimes Price obscures the original so much that it’s hard to make up your mind whether you’re looking at a photographic image or an abstraction. And then in the next slide, there may be a real fly, projected thousands of times larger than in real life. The images are so physical that you can’t help thinking about the real materials in the slides—giving the act of projection a substantiality it doesn’t usually have.