About

Some obsessions begin with a single, quiet moment. Mine began in the dusty aisles of antique stores, my mother beside me, pointing out the weight of a well-made drawer pull or the craftsmanship hiding in the curve of an old chair leg. She taught me to look closely — at the details, at the making, at the story an object carries simply by having existed.

I carried that habit with me everywhere.

Through college, through a corporate job, through the daily rhythm of emails and deadlines, weekends were still for thrifting. Coffee in hand, a good friend at my side, my mom when she could visit — hunting through stalls and vendor booths for something worth finding. There is a particular thrill in not knowing what's waiting for you. That feeling never got old.

In 2015, riffling through a stall full of vintage film equipment, I came across a small stack of 35mm slides. I held each one up to the light and saw tulip fields from the 1960s — vivid, luminous, impossibly detailed in something barely two inches wide. My first thought was: wouldn't these be incredible blown up huge? My second thought was that I had no idea how to do that. So I put them down and walked away, filing the idea somewhere in the back of my mind underoh, that would be cool.

Then 2020 arrived and gave us all something we hadn't had in a long time: space to think.

As the world slowly opened up, I started going to estate sales again. At one, tucked in the corner of a basement shelf, I found an unassuming box — and poking out of it, the immediately recognizable yellow and black of a Kodak slide box. I held one up to the single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling and found myself looking at a young man's college days at the Naval Academy in Annapolis — the same place my now-husband attended. I could see his summer cruise around the Mediterranean, the rivalry football games, the ordinary days that didn't feel ordinary anymore. Something about it stopped me completely.

This is it, I thought. I have the time. I know enough. I can figure this out.

I quietly took them upstairs, paid, and left.

What followed was months of experimenting — testing methods, learning to edit, figuring out how to do justice to these tiny, remarkable images. And then the hunt took over. More slides appeared at auctions, on Facebook Marketplace, from family and friends. The collection grew. It became a practice, a passion, and eventually, a business.

Today, Retrospect Studio Art is built on a collection of over 2,000 slides from all over the world — each one saved, catalogued, carefully edited, and brought to life as a fine art print.

Why slides?

Because they are literal windows into the past.

Film was expensive. It took time to develop. Nobody wasted a frame on something that didn't matter to them. Every slide in my collection represents a deliberate choice — a landmark worth capturing, a trip worth documenting, a moment worth preserving. And because they exist on transparency film, they can only be seen with light passing through them. Dark and mostly illegible until you hold one up to a bulb or a viewer, every slide has a moment of revelation. I love that anticipation, even now, even after thousands of them.

I love seeing how little has changed — how the same landmarks stand, how the same light falls, how the only clue that decades have passed is the cut of someone's coat or the shape of a car in the background. People weren't so different then. They took their families on vacation. They stood in front of famous things and took pictures. They tried to hold onto moments.

I hate the idea of these slides being thrown out or forgotten — too small to frame, too fragile to display, gathering dust in boxes nobody opens anymore. So I bring them to life in a way that lets them be seen, finally, the way they deserve to be — large, luminous, and on your wall.

Every print at Retrospect Studio Art begins with a real slide. Real vintage slides have lived a life — and you may notice the occasional worn edge, subtle nick, or faint mark in the film. We think that's exactly as it should be. These small imperfections are the fingerprints of time. They are not flaws. They are part of the story.

Small slides. Big art.

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