Night Lights by Diana Alsip

Issue 162

Night Lights is an ongoing project that is a culmination of experimental techniques and past work. It confronts my discomfort with my own family history and what is expected of me as a woman, daughter, and potential wife or mother. It explores the role of women, and the role I was expecting to be trapped in at this age of my life, played out by manipulating archival images and found family photos. The hope is to open spaces of healing and understanding within myself, breaking familial cycles of divorce, abandonment, and alcoholism in order to imagine a better future, and honor family members that are gone but perhaps misunderstood. Technically, Night Lights combines digital and analog processes. I scan found slides and snapshots, project them onto domestic spaces, and re-photograph them with medium format color film. The resulting images are then printed in a color darkroom.

I feel my displacement within my family history is echoed in a growing generational gap across the US, and like others in my generation I’m not sure where I fit in. Using an established vocabulary of images that live in a certain space of our collective subconscious (the slides I buy from eBay are mostly from the 1950s-1980s), I’m also trying to bridge the leftover expectations of past generations with the promising breakthroughs of younger ones. Working with the slide images is an interactive experience. I invite them in, move them around my own contemporary space to give them a new life, and in some work I even cast myself alongside them in the frame. I view this work as a collaboration with the people who exist in the found images, confronting the expectations set by that past generation in their own language in a way, subverting the things they’ve come to stand for.

Diana Alsip (she/her) lives and works in Astoria, New York.
dianaalsip.com | @dian_o_mite