The demise of film is the subject in Brea Souders’s series “Film Electric.” She photographs fragments of her own film and prints she has cut into tiny pieces. Souders began the project while cleaning out her archives in preparation for a move. “I was cutting the pieces up so nobody would take them from the waste bin,” she recalls. Also in the trash was an acetate negative sleeve, a long plastic envelope used to protect film. When she pulled it from the bin, slivers remained attached to the plastic, held by static electricity.

“Some of them fell and others stuck, and I just thought that was really beautiful, the way my memories were clinging together. It was a metaphor for film trying to hold on, literally,” Souders says. She photographs arrangements of these pieces in poetic, airy forms against a pale background. Cut from negatives and contact sheets, each fragment is recognizable, at least to her. Pointing to a shard of film, “This is Belize, I can tell by the shape of those palms,” she says in her sunny studio in her Brooklyn apartment. “I think we all experience memory in a similar way, with little bits and pieces of things colliding in unexpected ways. We all remember things in snippets.”