The Magic Lantern and Projected Photographs

In some ways, it's the original optical medium, the lanterna magica, the method behind the madness of Robertson's Phantasmagoria, the first device ever to "throw" an image on a screen. The great-granddaddy of the slide projector and the PowerPoint presentation, the technology that made the 'carousel' of life go 'round for Kodak, a mass medium and later a home entertainment system.

And, as Don Draper observed, it's about coming back to where we began, and feeling that strange 'twinge' of nostalgia -- which is why, I think, the Magic Lantern is presently enjoying a new life, a new vogue, and a new kind of magic. It began with folks such as Terry and Deborah Borton, who quit their day jobs to form the American Magic Lantern Theatre, and to write the first comprehensive account of the work of Joseph Boggs Beale, the premiere American lantern slide artist. It began with Joe and Alice Koch back in Tacoma, Washington in the 1960's; it began with Bill Douglas, Bob Bishop, Oldřich Albrecht, Judith Thurman and Jonathan David, Julius Pfranger, John Barnes, and Steve Humphries -- all of whom rediscovered this lost medium and helped retrace its history even as they brought it back to life. For, as it turned out, audiences today were as readily enthralled -- though perhaps for different reasons -- as were their grandparent and great-grandparents in the heyday of the Magic Lantern. Old lanterns could be found and collected, as could old slides; put the two together, add a top-hat and a booming voice, and all the ingredients were there for a revival of this lost art.

In 1851, a crucial innovation in photography -- that of the wet-plate collodion process -- enabled the production of photographic lantern slides. The glass plates produced by this process were negative images, from which any number of glass positives or paper prints might be made; a more common method, for portraits and single-use images, was simply to place black paper or cloth behind the negative. A downside of the process was that the plates had to be exposed while still wet -- a very narrow window -- but this was later solved (1871) and various dry plate processes were developed.

For a good introduction, I've scanned the first section of the hard-to-find book Projected Photography, which is available to you in .pdf for via this link. As discussed in class, I'm also asking everyone to bring in a photo from you own personal or family archive -- it doesn't have to be an antique, simply a photo that has particular significance that you'd like to share.