THE SLIDES

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This series of 19 slides depicts scenes from a British group traveling through the Italian and Austrian Alps in the summer of 1958.

 

The film stock used is unknown. The original photographer catalogued the images on a set of personalized glass slides wrapped in black tape. On the back of each slide, the photographer marked the date, location and assigned a number to each picture. The numbers on the slides range from 108 to 144, indicating that they belong to a larger collection of pictures. 

 

THE TRIP

 

On the 27th of July 1958, the group visited the town of Misurina in the northern part of the Veneto region in Italy (slides 108, 112, 113, and 114).

 

Later the same day, the group drank Chianti wine (slides 115 and 116).On the following day, the group departed north to Rifugio A. Locatelli/Dreizinnenhütte in the Trento region of Italy. Upon their arrival in Locatelli, they found a group of men and children playing guitar (slides 119 and 120). Later, they visited a valley of flowers (slides 123, 124, and 125).

 

There are no pictures documenting the group's activities on the 29th of July 1958.

 

On the 30th of July 1958, the group hiked up a mountain (slides 129, 133, 134, 135 and 136). There is no indication of the exact spot the group visited.

 

On slide 136, titled “Group,” we find an important clue about the faces behind these photographs. The slide depicts a group of five people posing on the top of a mountain. That indicates that every other person in the pictures is probably local to the region, and providing us a window to speculate about local life during that period.

 

On the 31st of July, the group continued their travel up north to the town of Trins in the Tirol region of Austria (slides 138, 139, and 144).

 

A NEW ADVENTURE

 

In a different box of slides, four additional pictures from August 1968 were found, depicting the region of Habich Mountain in the Austrian Tirol. The four slides were catalogued in the exact same manner as the previous collection, leading us to believe they were taken by the same photographer a decade later. The slides were marked as numbers 13, 30, 41, and 47. On slide 13, we find a repetition of a group photo.