Slides, Steel, and Sentiment: A Journey Through Time and Clutter

What do I do with my slide box? There it sits, all c. 35 pounds of steel, awaiting its fate. Probably a “Repurposing Your 35mm Slide Cabinet” website exists somewhere on the internet (I’m afraid to look). If so, the suggestions will likely include jewelry storage, arts-and-crafts organizer, and small tool storage. These are not ignoble ends, but are they the best ends for this gun-metal grey personal treasure?

I say “treasure” because buying this cabinet was a significant professional investment for me. I took the plunge and ordered it (from an art-supply catalogue, via a phone call) in the mid 1990s when my personal collection of slides overflowed my cache of individual carousels and a single-layer, latched metal box. Well into my professorship at Southern Methodist University, I had been rapidly adding to the repository of slides needed for my classes and they, in turn, were spilling out everywhere.

Of course, the real source of slides we used in our classes belonged to the magnificent Southern Methodist University Slide Library. A windowless room lined with floor-to-shoulder-height cabinets, the Slide Library held hundreds of thousands of slides, accrued over the years by the renowned faculty of SMU’s prominent Art History department. Simply put, professors would let it be known what images of paintings, sculptures, architecture, and decorative objects were needed, from Ancient times to Modern, and someone in the Photography Division would make them, sourcing them not from the still-future internet, of course, but from the ravishingly beautiful art volumes that filled the Meadows School of the Arts’ library.

Getting slides made outside the university was prohibitively expensive. It involved driving heavy books to a Dallas photography studio and having images reproduced at around $2.50 per slide (think of it as $8 per slide today). For a given professional lecture, such as for the Dallas Symphony or the Van Cliburn Concert Series, I might be extravagant and pony up enough for 10 slides. (Today I regularly run 50 digitally images in an hour lecture.)

Over time, those slides accumulated. All told, my collection grew into the thousands. And, yes, the colors are fading. The cardboard frames that house half of them are fraying; the plastic frames that house the rest tend to lose their snap and come apart, dumping their tiny negatives out into space. No matter their condition, something has to be done with them.

The answer is purge. Few things are more outdated the 35mm slides. The whole “slide” technology is not just obsolete but heavy. Add the bulk and weight of the slide projector (mine is still in terrific shape) to the bulk and weight of the early “portable” projector that I often had to provide myself when giving lectures for arts organizations (I cannot believe I did that!), and you end up carting a mess of weight in and out of cars, up and down stairs of parking garages and concert backstage areas. It was not fun, but it was the only way to do things if I wanted “visuals.”

Or, I could expunge everything, except for the 100 or so slides that preserve images of long-ago family members. And even these can be digitized, I know. Still, I’m already overwhelmed with digital images that I will never find among the tens of thousands I have. Ye who are hyper-organized in this respect, who create digital folders and, more importantly, fastidiously delete all but the best two or three shots from any given occasion, withhold your laughter please! We all aspire to be you. Some of us won’t make it.

Still, the time to do something is now. My best solution is to set up a series of weekend “movie” nights and not tell the grandkids that the movie in question will be Grandma’s slides. If there’s enough heavily buttered popcorn, I can probably pull it off. We could go through them, aiming to eliminate a couple of hundred a night. Faded shots of famous landmarks and art works will not be reprieved: far better ones exist on-line. Most of the personal slides need to go too, especially the ones where I say “Uh, who is that?”

But the slides I took in the USSR in the early 1980s, these I do need to digitize. And maybe even some from the early 1990s taken in Russia and former Eastern Europe when the visual tenor of old Soviet days still lingered.

Let’s say I solve the problem of the slides themselves. What about the box? With its sturdy three drawers, each divided into five lanes, my slide cabinet was admittedly a pipsqueak when compared to the dazzling wall cabinets back at SMU. Still, it ranked with having my own Olivetti Cyrillic-Alphabet manual typewriter (a treasure I bought for myself in the 1970s and on which I learned to type in Russian).

I could sell the slide box on eBay, I suspect. (Can you imagine packing up that baby?) Similar versions, to my surprise, are still made apparently for medical slides and the like. On the other hand, my grandson would jump up and down to acquire it as his collector’s cabinet: it would hold special parts for Legos, rocks, seashells, and a couple of secreted Oreos quite well. Surely this is how figures like Peter the Great and Johann von Goethe got their starts as famed collectors of curiosities (minus the Oreos).

Or, if today weren’t so booked up, I might compose a lengthy panegyric for my slide box. It would begin:

O ye vessel, so belovéd
Sturdy mountain, steel and grey,
O the memories therein mounted,
Let me not send this away!

I am a professional declutterer’s nightmare. But the journey has been glorious and sweet, as this tabernacle of metal and its decks of thin contents attest. The slides stare up at me, like gaping baby swallows, as I repeat to myself: “The memories are in the heart, not in the objects.” When I reach my full grasp of that truth, I will let you know.