I found this slide at a thrift store in 2005 I think. I saw two or three carousel boxes on a shelf and my heart started racing! Each carousel only had a few slides in it, so I picked through them, put the ones I wanted all into one box, and bought it for a song. I came away with a few others from this family’s time in Florida, including another from Weeki Wachee, and one with the kids and a sponge diver in Tarpon Springs. I couldn’t believe my luck, to have found not only some fantastic slides, but Floridiana no less!
In some ways, this slide started it all. I was really into the idea of found images and unseen negatives, but didn’t know what to do with any of them yet. At that time, I didn’t even have a way to digitize the slide, so it went into a sleeve, into a binder, and into a closet. It’s been with me through multiple moves, through grad school, through many jobs. For a while I thought I lost it in a move—I was elated when it turned up!
When I started photoxo, I began buying prints and slides to use as stock photos for my blog posts and courses—after all, you’d notice if every picture was of me or my family (and I never use client photos for that purpose). As I started looking at these thousands of anonymous photos I was ending up with, I thought
These are far to good to keep to myself. How can I get these in front of more people?
Inspired by the success of other vintage image curators, and with my background in fine arts, I decided to start a little side project called Picurious. With Picurious, I take the best of the best of my image collection and offer fine-art reprints for your home. Photos are available in a variety of sizes and price points. And if you see one on my Instagram feed that you can’t live without, I often print by request.
Some collectors would rather have original prints and slides, so I have some of those on Picurious too. I’ve already sold quite a few images to artists who need found images for their own projects. These photos have so many lives beyond their original exposure and I couldn’t be more excited about that.
I’m so happy to share these delightful images—I’ve got several of them hanging in my house where they’ve gained a second life. And I’m always updating the site with both more digital editions and original prints and slides. Will one of them be at home with you?
