America, 1986

For almost forty years these photographs existed as a single object: a grey slide carousel in a cupboard, eighty-some mounted frames of Ektachrome, each one a small window you could hold up to a lamp. Nobody projected them after the early nineties. The projector bulb burned out, replacement bulbs became a specialist item, and the carousel did what carousels do — it became furniture.

The slides were scanned for this archive in 2025. What came off the film was startling. Ektachrome does not fade so much as settle: the blues cool down, the shadows go slightly cyan, and the result is that the eighties look more like the eighties than they ever did at the time. Every frame here was taken in 1986 with an Olympus OM-1 — a fully mechanical camera, no battery needed except for the light meter, the kind of machine you could drop and then apologise to.

The trip itself was the great middle-class itinerary of the decade: fly into Toronto, drive to Niagara, fly to New York, then a long second leg out west through Chicago and Arizona. Whoever held the camera was not trying to make art. They were keeping a record, the way you kept a record before telephones did it for you — one deliberate frame at a time, because film cost money and the trip was once. That economy of attention is the single biggest difference between this carousel and a modern camera roll, and you can feel it in every composition: each picture is the only picture of that moment that exists.

The trip began in Toronto, and Toronto in 1986 was a city in the middle of becoming itself. The CN Tower was ten years old and still the tallest free-standing structure in the world; it appears in these frames the way it appeared in every tourist's frames, but look past it and the picture gets interesting. The downtown is full of gaps. Parking lots sit where glass towers now stand. The lakefront is industrial and oddly quiet. A city photographing itself mid-sentence.

From the observation deck the OM-1 looked straight down at streets laid out like circuit boards, and at dusk the camera came out again for the blue hour — the parking lots emptying, the office lights coming on, Ektachrome doing what Ektachrome does to artificial light, which is to make it look like jewellery. There is also a dutiful frame of Roy Thomson Hall, then four years old, its mirrored dome parked next to — inevitably — another parking lot.

Between cities, the windshield frames. A highway somewhere in Ontario, the hood of the rental car at the bottom of the picture like a signature. A Canadian flag photographed because it was there and because you photograph flags when you travel; it is the kind of frame every family album contains and every archive secretly treasures, because nobody composes a picture like a person with thirty-one exposures left and a week to go.

Every roll shot at Niagara looks the same and none of them are. The falls are the most photographed place on the continent — by 1986 they had already been photographed for a hundred and forty years — and still nobody leaves without firing half a roll. This carousel contains seventeen frames of falling water. They were all kept, and they are all here in the archive, because the repetition is itself the document: this is what it is to stand in front of something that exceeds the frame, and to keep trying anyway.

The Skylon Tower appears across the gorge, the observation decks crowded. The mist column rises in frame after frame like a permanent cloud. And then there are the two strangest pictures in the whole collection: the falls at night, photographed through an airplane window — handheld, lens wide open, the shutter probably somewhere around a quarter of a second. The falls reduce to a lit seam in the darkness, the floodlights smeared by engine vibration. By any technical standard the frames are failures. They were kept for forty years anyway, which tells you what technical standards are worth.

Manhattan carries the largest share of the carousel, and it earns it. New York in 1986 photographed like a set that had been dressed by someone with no concept of restraint: men in suits and sunglasses crossing against the light, steam rising from the grates as if the street were breathing, the World Trade Center anchoring every southward view with a kind of casual permanence that is hard to look at now.

The city was at a particular point in its cycle — past the bankruptcy and the blackout years, deep into the Wall Street boom, crime still high, rents still survivable. None of that is in the pictures, exactly. What is in the pictures is the light: that hard, slotted, late-century Manhattan light that falls down the avenues in the morning and turns every cross street into a canyon wall. Ektachrome metered for the highlights and let the shadows go, and the result is a city drawn in slabs.

The street frames are the best things this photographer ever did, and it is not clear they knew it. A man in a suit with a briefcase and sunglasses, caught mid-stride, is forty years of corporate America in a single figure. A performance in Central Park draws a crowd dressed entirely in pastels and pleats. Silhouettes against a bright facade. These were grab shots, taken between the monuments, and like most grab shots in most family albums they outlive the monuments completely.

The harbour circuit got a full afternoon: the Statue of Liberty from the boat — photographed twice, once close and once with the deck rail in frame — and the Staten Island ferry, which was then and remains now the best free photograph in America. Brooklyn sits across the East River in a haze. The water is crowded with working boats in a way it no longer is.

One evening was spent at Yankee Stadium — Indians versus Yankees, the old stadium, eleven years before the renovation politics and twenty-three before the demolition. The stadium lights on Ektachrome are worth the price of the whole roll. The grass goes emerald in a way no digital sensor will agree to, the crowd dissolves into warm grain, and the scoreboard burns white like a small sun. There are three frames: afternoon, evening, night, as if the photographer sat through the whole game watching the light instead of the score. Given what Ektachrome cost, this counts as devotion.

The bridges got their own attention. The United Nations Secretariat photographed twice from the Queensboro Bridge — once tight, once wide with the whole midtown wall behind it — and the East River in flat morning light. The hotel on United Nations Plaza appears three times, which suggests it is where they stayed, and there is one frame of an AT&T laboratories entrance, which suggests somebody on this trip had a meeting they never mentioned at dinner. Family albums keep their secrets in plain sight.

From New York the trip jumped west, and the carousel changes temperature. Chicago first, in winter or something close to it: the lake frozen out to the horizon in great plates, photographed from the shoreline like an arctic field that had been delivered to the wrong address. The Playboy building makes an appearance — it still had the sign then — looking exactly as embarrassed as a building can look.

Then Arizona, and the last act of the roll. The frames go widescreen even though the camera could not: empty road, saguaros, a gas stop with nothing around it in any direction. Almost everything is shot through the windshield or from the shoulder, the dashboard intruding at the bottom of the frame. After three weeks of cities the photographer had clearly fallen in love with absence. The light is completely different out here — vertical, white, shadowless at midday — and Ektachrome, that cool blue film, finally meets a sky it cannot exaggerate.

The roll ran out before the trip did. That is how almost every film archive ends — not with a closing statement but with frame thirty-six, wherever frame thirty-six happened to fall.

Thirty-six exposures at a time, a family covered eight thousand kilometres and edited as they went, every frame deliberate because the next one cost forty cents and the trip would not come again. The archive holds eighty-one of those decisions. The carousel sat in the dark for four decades doing the one thing film does better than anything else: waiting. These pictures were nobody's idea of photography. They are now this archive's idea of it exactly — the ordinary record, carefully made, that becomes extraordinary by the simple, unrepeatable accident of time.