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Lyle Ashton Harris is featured on CNN

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Lyle Ashton Harris (Faculty) is feature on CNN Style.

A trove of old Ektachrome slides shows artists, friends and lovers in the 1980s and '90s

November 2020

When Lyle Ashton Harris' grandfather passed away, he and his brother inherited a vast trove of over 10,000 Ektachrome slides documenting his day-to-day life. Developed in the early 1940s, the film is a brand name from Kodak, and was a new type of color technology when their grandfather adopted it. (Instead of adding color to black-and-white images during processing, as is done with Kodachrome, this film allowed people to take images directly in color.)

Four decades later, multimedia artist Harris began his own Ektachrome archive, in the 1980s and '90s as art and culture underwent seismic shifts, galvanized in part by a new wave of Black artists and critical thinkers, as well as LGBTQ artists grappling with the AIDS epidemic. Harris documented friends, lovers, idols and himself, as they moved through the linked creative and political circles that helped define this era.

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