ABOUT THE WORK
Ordinary life at the edge of historical change.
Ordinary Endings is an artist book by Zinnia Siegel and Juana Fava, built from an archive of 35mm slides found at a Manhattan flea market. With no record of their origin, the slides offered only fragments of a larger history. Their anonymity—and the tension between what they revealed and what remained unknowable—became the starting point for the project, developed and curated in Keisha Scarville’s Photo Archive course at Parsons School of Design.
After scanning and processing more than 500 images, the artists traced much of the material to the late Soviet period between the late 1950s and 1989. The archive combines state-produced educational slide sets with photographs from late Cold War citizen-diplomacy exchanges, including the 1988 International Peace Walk from Odessa to Kiev.
There is a tension between these two forms of image-making: one ideological and state-structured, the other casual and deeply human. What drew the artists in was how the photographs sit at the edge of historical transition without visibly recognizing it. Nothing in the vernacular photographs announces collapse or transformation; they simply show ordinary life.
That distance between everyday life and historical change makes the archive feel especially urgent in the present-day United States. At a moment shaped by political polarization, renewed nuclear anxiety, rising nationalism, and uncertainty about the country’s place as a global power, these photographs ask what instability looks like from inside it—before its meaning becomes clear. Through sequencing, graphic design, and handwritten text, the project looks at images made near the end of one global power from within another.
The books are handmade using rice paper, acetate, and cardstock, and were presented with a wooden slide holder built to display selections from the archive.
