Uncanny drift

What follows is a revised version of a text originally written to accompany a photography exhibition entitled Drift by Daniel Rapley. Rapley collected some 200,000 discarded 35 mm slides from house clearances and then created a series of pictures by ‘photographing slides stacked together on a light box’. The slides are anonymous: there is no information about any of the individuals who appear in them, or about who took the photographs in the first place. At the same time, they are often strangely moving and imposing in their sense of intimacy. Circling around detailed attention to just one of Rapley’s composite images (Drift # 654: see illustration 1), Royle seeks to outline a new reading of Freud’s groundbreaking essay on the uncanny in terms of the figure of drift.