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There is a great lineup of artists coming to visit this fall in Book and Paper, including Guerilla Girls, Peter Geraty, and Dafi Kühne. But the first to pass through was artist Vesna Pavlovic.

Pavlovic is originally from Belgrade, Serbia but teaches now at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Her latest series, which she focused on primarily in her lecture, was displayed at the 12th Istanbul Biennial. In it, images from found slides of Americans on vacation, mostly from the 1960’s, are projected on large freestanding screens. The slides are loaded into Kodak Carousel slide projectors and set to change automatically. Accompanying the projected images are the sounds of clicks and switches, the slides advancing.

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The combination of an old way of presenting photographic imagery paired with the ‘light collaging’ of the display creates a unique atmosphere in which one views the pieces.

In her artist statement, Pavlovic says, “In my most recent work, the photography practice itself is the subject, and is explored through the transformation of the image and its perception within various viewing conditions.”

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As someone who is very interested in process driven media (you know, like binding, letterpress printing, and papermaking), I found this statement fascinating. That the practice of filtering these found images through different objects, the slide projector and screens, is being used as a way of emphasizing its origins, technically and historically, is just completely interesting – not to mention how beautiful the end product is.

*All images were snagged from her website. I was so intrigued I forgot to take photographs during her lecture.