My upcycling project is a lampshade made from old film slides. I think it’s really fun to look at old photo collections and wonder who took them and what they were doing in that place. I went to an art reuse center and grabbed a handful of slides after briefly looking through their selection. After bringing them home, I spent more time examining each slide and documenting my favorites.
After spending so much time with the photos, it feels difficult to punch holes in them to make my lampshade. But I wonder if I did not use them, where would they go? I think this is a problem many people encounter. At an antique store, we sometimes debate buying something because we think it is “too nice” for us. Maybe as kids, we buy a sheet of stickers and never use the “best” ones because we are saving them for something perfect, but in the end, we do not use them at all. The point of an upcycling project is to repurpose things that might otherwise go unused, so I need to move past the guilt of altering the film slides and give them a new purpose.
It’s hard to name the aesthetic of using other people’s past possessions, but I suppose that is just what upcycling is. I’ll call it “nostalgic ephemera” to emphasize the feeling we get when admiring objects that hold strong emotions for the person who owned them, as well as the physical idea of a souvenir-type item. The actual construction of the lampshade will involve silver jump rings with the images formatted in a grid. I am still debating whether to add something other than film slides in a few of the two-inch square spots to bring more variety and chaos to a grid that I cannot manipulate very much.
I also had a hard time deciding on this project because it has been done many times before. I was concerned that the lack of uniqueness would make it a poor example of what I can create, but in the end, I decided that this is what I want to make, so I should make it. Of course, designing my own projects is important and fun, but sometimes I love another project so much that I just have to make it. I already own a thrifted lamp base, so the only part I will be making for this project is the lampshade.
As I mentioned earlier, it will be difficult to punch holes in these strangers’ film slides, but part of the beauty of upcycling, thrifting, or buying antiques is the proof of life they carry. I would probably find an old, scratched, and well-traveled guitar more appealing than a brand-new one because it holds so much history. The idea of nostalgic ephemera is that we can have empathy for the life of an object. Looking at these photos, I can’t help but imagine how fun a family’s trip to Spain was or the lives a couple who got married in the 60s have lived. My favorite part of all this is that I can admire photos I didn’t take and will never know who actually took them.
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What a cool project idea! My dad has hundreds of slides from his trips and early life and I remember countless times setting up the slide projector and going through them as he told us the stories. Such an experience can transport you to a time you were not able to experience yourself, truly nostalgic by transcending time. I wonder if you could find some translucent plain colored squares of maybe acrylic, or something and create a pattern of those with the slides themselves to one add more color and two add more variety.
I agree that looking through old photos is a really valuable and transcending experience. I actually thought about solid translucent colors in the form of acrylic, or even some scrunched pieces of thin fabric with a stiffener for some 3D variation. Another option I thought of is making small stained glass pieces to fill in some spots instead of film slides. I think I could even do some of all of these options to really make the project unique.
This project is super interesting, and I love how you touched on the human side of making something like this. I totally understand the oddness of using slides from the lives of others and remaking something you have seen before, but those feelings work perfectly with the idea of nostalgic ephemera. I also haven’t heard of a film slide lampshade before, so I’m really curious to see how you select and physically arrange these snapshots from the past together. Speaking of, what criteria did you consider while selecting slides? Is there an also an aesthetic to the content of the slide you were considering, was it an optimization of maximum vicarious nostalgia, or something else?
I love “optimization of maximum vicarious nostalgia” and I think that’s pretty accurate to what I was going for. Personally, I don’t love nature photography so I leaned away from that, but besides that, I really just chose the photos that I thought held the most story. For example, I didn’t grab many photos of mountains or trees, but I took almost any photo that had a person in it because I could take a photo of mountains but I couldn’t take a photo of that person. The selection process was just fun overall because there were so many slides to choose from and I probably stood sorting through bins for 30 minutes, appreciating every slide one by one.