+ Film Electric

2013 / 2014
-exerpt from essay by Jeremy Haik and Dominica Paige for Conveyor Magazine:
The phenomenon of static electricity is the result of an imbalance of electrons on the surface of an object. When it occurs, the object is no longer in a state of electrical neutrality; it carries an invisible attractive charge.

The project has its origins within the context of routine studio maintenance. Initially, scraps of discarded negatives – bad exposures, experiments, empty sections of film, and so on – happened to cling (due to static electricity) to a sheet of acetate while Souders was in the process of clearing out her archives. The results were unexpected but proved serendipitous, and so she photographed the chance arrangement. This detritus stubbornly persisted as a tangible, material form of haunting; traces of her personal history lingered in abstracted and incomplete forms on an invisible ground, and are now the inhabitants of wholly new photographs. Images that were presumed to be dead and gone are resurrected; bathed in the light of rebirth.