The End of Slides?

by Daniel Grant

Chicago art dealer Rhona Hoffman has a slide projector - "it's probably 50 years old, at least," she said - and she hasn't used it for "quite a while." The Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston has a slide projector "somewhere, but I'm not sure where it is," according to gallery director Andrew Witkin. Still, for hopeful artists sending slides of their work to dealers, those responses are more promising than that of Roberta Brashears, director of Nedra Matteucci Fine Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, who stated flatly that "No, we don't have a slide projector but, can you believe it, artists still send us slides."

When slides come in and the dealers choose to look at them, Hoffman, Witkin and Brashears hold them up to the ceiling lights for somewhere between one-half of a second to two seconds. "It hurts my neck to do it much longer than that," Hoffman said. Rare is the dealer who treats slides in any other way: The projector is somewhere in the back room; no one remembers the last person to use the slide viewer, a smaller device for viewing one slide at a time, so its whereabouts are likewise unknown; the light table, if there is one, has a lot of books and papers on it. Artists have gone to a lot of effort to get their work looked at so hastily and inappropriately.

The future doesn't look much brighter for slides. Kodak, the largest producer of slide projectors in the world, recently has discontinued making them, concentrating more and more on digital representations, leaving only a handful of smaller producers (Eiki in Japan, Simda in France, Leica in Switzerland and Vivitar in California) to supply the dwindling market. "We used to sell thousands of slide projectors a year," said Howard Winch, national sales manager for Elmo Manufacturing Corporation in Plainview, New York, "and we still have some inventory. We may sell between 20 and 50 a month, but our production has ceased." For its part, Kodak will continue to produce color slide films, as well as provide service and parts for its projectors until 2011.

"Slide projectors are yesterday's technology," said a sales representative at the online audio-visual products vendor FocusCamera.com, adding that the company no longer has any in stock. Winch noted that e-Bay is a better source of slide projectors and light boxes than camera stores these days. For artists, the question may be, are art galleries and juried show sponsors looking for today's technology - digital images, sent as a TIF or GIFF or JPEG or on a CD-ROM or a printed-out digital file, or the address of an artist's Web site - or do they still want slides but are just not buying or using slide projectors?

The answer is not clear-cut, in part because galleries increasingly are accepting images in a variety of formats. "I used to tell artists to send a maximum of 20 slides," Arthur Dion, director of Boston's Gallery NAGA, said. "Now, I tell artists a maximum of 20 images." Ruth Braunstein, director of San Francisco's Braunstein/Quay Gallery, which uses its two slide projectors several times per week, noted that she's "not that computer-wise," although the gallery accepts JPEGS. A benefit of JPEGS over slides, she said, is that "you don't have to send them back," while slides are preferable for storage.

A number of gallery owners claimed, as did Christopher Addison, director of Washington, D.C.'s Addison/Ripley Gallery, that "slides are still the best archival record of an object," but he doesn't necessarily need the highest quality representation "when I'm just getting introduced to a work of art." That first look at some unknown artist's work is just for the purposes of information and, if he is interested, "I'll want to see it in person anyway."

Five years ago, 90% of the images sent to the gallery were slides, Addison said, but now slides may only represent half, as artists submit CD-ROMs, DVDs, transparencies, print-outs from digital files and even photographs. "I don't expect to be working with slides five years from now," he noted.

Edited by Robyn Kelly, Web Publications Manager: rkelly@iac.in.gov.
The IAC, a public catalyst, partner, and investor in the arts, serves the citizens of Indiana by funding, promoting, and expanding the arts. Funding is provided by the State of Indiana and the National Endowment for the Arts.