Vintage Photographs with Small Dots of Light Give Off An Enchanting, Ghostly Glow

Villigen, Germany

Afterglow

For Dare alla Luce, photographer Amy Friend collects faded memories in the form of vintage and antique photographs, which she penetrates to reveal small spots of light. Re-photographing the altered print, she captures eerily doubled images that appear ghostly and divine, as if dotted with stars. The figures immortalized here are strangers to Friend, and by piercing the surface of the two-dimensional print, she allows portions of mysterious recollections to irrevocably vanish. Each title comes either from notes scrawled on the backs of the images themselves or from Friend’s own reflections on photography.

In being trespassed and punctured, the original photographs cease to document what is forgotten and emerge reborn. Like constellations across the sky, their wounds commemorate unnamed people and places that have ceased to exist as they once were. In the destruction of material, we find the intangible human spirit, that invisible element than can never be recorded photographically. Here, we return to the fact of darkness and light, to the obscure landscape of our own tenuous remembrances.

Latent Light

What is done in the darkness, will be brought to the light

The guardian

The time I was in Cape Breton

Niagara, 1949

Small museums of everyday life

I dream of that day

All that is solid melts

The three of them

Tilda

My Sister

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