Long time professional southern Alberta photographer turning his slide collection into art

Pat Price has taken over 30,000 photos for Alberta news outlets in the 1980s. Some 1,200 film slides of those are now part of a new display.

Pat Price first started taking pictures for the Calgary Sun in 1981 and has accumulated thousands of slides that ended up in boxes at his Cochrane home.

In December he got the idea to mount some of his slides onto the glass of old window frames.

“The beauty about doing this is the visual effect is really cool,” said Price. “But when people start looking at who some of the people are that are in the slides and they kind of go, ‘oh look, there’s Gorbachev or there’s Bob Dylan or there’s Alice Cooper’.”

His images are of news and sporting events in the 80s along with some landscape, farming and rodeo shots. He’s close to completing his fifth window frame and says he spent close to four hours a day over one month editing 1,200 slides for his art pieces.

“I’d like to put them in a gallery,” he said. “I haven’t put any mounts on them to hang them yet but I want to get them in a Calgary gallery because a lot of this was shot in Calgary during the 80s.”

In the 1980s Price worked for a variety of news agencies and in 1987 on a book project with a number of other local professional photographers called Calgary: A Year in Focus.

“That was the beginning of me shooting a lot of slide film,” he said. “I was mainly shooting negative at the time and that’s the bulk of the work was on negative or digital.

“Slide film unlike negative, is rigid,” he added. “You have to be accurate with the light — if you’re a half stop over or a half stop under, it really shows.”

Alberta memories

His slide collection is close to 30,000 and many come with memories and interesting stories. When the Edmonton Oilers won their first Stanley Cup in the provincial capital, after the game Price’s photo editor told him to not leave the dressing room until the Cup left. So Price waited outside the door patiently and was rewarded.

“Finally (Wayne) Gretzky comes out with the Cup, carrying it over his head on his shoulders,” he said. “And there was Dave Semenko, Glenn Anderson and (Wayne’s) girlfriend at the time and I was the only one there, they wanted me taking pictures and I kept looking over my shoulder thinking where is everyone?”

Price says many people who see him at work in ‘The Common Works’ makerspace in Cochrane are awed by how Calgary has changed over the years. He says one of the benefits of this kind of art form is when direct sunlight hits the frames with all the slides mounted, it creates a stained glass window effect that is more dramatic against a white surface.

“Everything is transferred to the to the white piece of cardboard underneath it,” he said. “It’s really cool so you get almost like a double image of the image on the glass and then the image on the cardboard.”

Price is enjoying the process of mounting his slides on the frames to create art and isn’t stopping at five pieces.

“I’m definitely doing more, yeah,” he said. “This is my last window thus far for doing this, I ran out windows, so I’m on the hunt for more.”