Philly Fringe 2025: Automatic Arts presents Josh McIlvain’s Slideshow

McIlvain first presented Slideshow in the 2014 Fringe. The vintage photos are real, but the story is not—though there are so many shots over the years of Steve and Mayse that you start to wonder if maybe this is a true story after all (if so, McIlvain would have to be much older than he looks). The subtext is that the people in these pictures existed, whoever they were, but no-one would ever have seen them again if it weren’t for Slideshow.

The audience sits on chairs at Mt. Airy Waves, an exercise studio in a converted garage. On the night I attended, the doors were open to a perfect night with a slight breeze blowing in—the same way my Uncle Len and Aunt Marie did it when I was very small. At one point McIlvain offered the audience a beer from an ancient cooler, and played a few old tunes on cassette.

The way most of us experience pictures now is someone thumbing through their phone for five minutes, giving up and showing a different photo while telling a story. But we used to look at photo slides placed in a carousal to fit into the projector, so their order was fixed. McIlvain uses this to create a story, clicking along, pointing out details, casually naming people in the background. The story is of his narrator’s parents and their friends hanging out together, and the character’s own growing disconnection, drifting around stranger and stranger locations.

There are moments where the narrative seems to lose the thread, and we seem to be looking at photos just because he likes them, but then he ties them in coherently. There are laughs in the show, some just from the composition of the shots.

McIlvain’s narrator is self-effacing, and true to the tone of somebody showing strangers his old family photo album. His voice sometimes hesitates before he explains what happened to someone onscreen, a happy face, never seen again. He captures the tone of revisiting an old photo album and encountering a certain picture that is depressing to think about now, or a face that triggers an anecdote that he thinks we’re too young to understand. The photos are largely from the 60s, which already looks like another planet.

The subject of memory is more relevant than it might have been when Slideshow was conceived in 2014. Thousands of pictures live on our phones, and even the person who took them doesn’t remember most of them. It’s hard to share movies or music, since physical media is less common, organizing digital media is work, and not everyone has the same digital platform. Museums are under attack for displaying real things.

There are four boxes of slides on the top shelf of my hall closet, an archive from my wife’s family. We don’t have the right carousel to fit the old slideshow projector. And no McIlvain to tell us what we’re looking at.