The geography slides: Seeing through the analogue and the digital

This paper considers the digital scanning of geography slides held in a departmental collection, and how such work might re-animate aspects of geography’s visual culture, while also prompting reflection on the relationship of the analogue and the digital. The paper examines the connections between geography and photography, the particular role of the slide as a photographic format and cultural object, and the possibilities of description of scanned analogue slides. Digitisation allows close scrutiny of the kinds of material held in many geographical collections, and renewed consideration of earlier depictions of place and landscape. A collection of slides of the English East Midlands, produced in the decades after the Second World War and held by the School of Geography, University of Nottingham, is considered, and two photographic slides receive detailed scrutiny, one coastal and one urban. Illustrated descriptions of these pictures conclude the paper, giving demonstration accounts of what might be done with geography slides, after digitisation.