The Ballad of Reversals: Ephemeral Images of Ephemeral Art

From seminal art performances and exhibitions to birthday celebrations at the office, the history of Franklin Furnace was largely captured and preserved on a now obsolete medium called “reversal film,” commonly known as “slide film.” Due to this film’s high quality and ability to create positive images that don’t require darkroom printing processes to see, 35mm color reversal film became widely popular in the second half of the 20th century, especially as a documentary tool used by amateurs and professionals alike. From the 1960s through the early 2000s, artists, particularly those whose practices were conceptual and ephemeral in nature, used reversal film to document and exhibit their work in all media.

The reversal films at Franklin Furnace are stored in archival boxes within a climate-controlled room to ensure their long-term preservation. For images captured on film, exposure to light is both what creates them and the source of their deterioration. This is the case for all photographic transparencies, but it is particularly true for reversal film, which is designed to be exposed to light every time it is viewed. Color fading in reversal films occurs with even slight exposure to light, even over a short period of time. In this sense, reversal film is a paradoxical medium for documentation — preserving ephemeral moments while subject to its own ephemerality.

Today, the reversal film in Franklin Furnace’s Event Archives is digitized and cataloged in a digital database. The digitized images are color-corrected and, unlike the images on the original reversal films, will not fade over time. They are infinitely more ‘shareable’ than slides on a projector — a key feature contributing to the popularity of reversal film back in the day.

Over the past two decades reversal film has lost its vitality as a means of documentation and so our understanding of the medium has shifted. Reversal film now has its own history as archival material, deepening its relationship to the past and to those who make the effort to preserve the medium. While digital photography continues to perfect its formless optical potential, reversal films remain in the physical world, where all the interesting things worth photographing occur.