The wide-reaching cultural and social impact of slide technology has been likened to that of the cinema or the Internet, both profoundly destabilising and transformative media.Footnote1 Suddenly, as Walter Benjamin most famously described, the mechanically reproduced image could be exhibited anywhere, in the home, in the church hall or in the schoolroom, disrupting its original function so profoundly that ‘instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics’.Footnote2 While slides have played a vital role in transmitting culture, their narratives have been overshadowed by histories described through photographic prints. These articles on the photographic slide lecture contribute to the reconsideration of this imbalance, nuancing the place of the slide in the history of photography and the broader fields of visual and material culture studies.
This special issue of History of Photography builds upon a virtual conference panel held at the Universities Art Association of Canada in 2020. The aim of the panel was to probe the role of slides in illustrated lectures by exploring questions such as what can we gain from studying the history of these objects through the means in which they were produced, sold and presented to audiences? How has the performative experience of the slide lecture shaped the audience’s understanding of what is being taught? What role do slides continue to play in shaping our historical understanding of art, photography, science and culture more broadly? And, as these earlier technological innovations are replaced with new methods for presenting images, what will the legacy of the slide lecture be?
The introduction of the photographic slide lecture in the mid to late nineteenth century transformed learning experiences, rendering them more visually stimulating and accessible than previously possible. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that slides have played a vital role in transmitting an array of cultural, social and political values as part of the nineteenth century’s outgrowth of popular leisure activities.Footnote3 A wide variety of publics, including children and adults alike, enjoyed the slide show’s ‘edu-tainment’ capabilities, in line with the earlier embrace of panorama shows and as a precursor to the moving image.Footnote4 Slide presentations successfully married science, politics and recreation to instruct audiences on topics from anthropology, to geography, to astronomy, as well as broader cultural ideas about gender, race, sex and even childhood.Footnote5
The ability to manufacture commercial sets of slides and transcribed lecture notes made these images, and their interpretations, flexible and wide reaching.Footnote6 Commercial suppliers published books to accompany their slide sets ‘which gave detailed descriptions of each slide, as well as lecture text outlines’.Footnote7 The effectiveness of these animated lectures led to their quick popularisation and adoption as tools of propaganda aimed towards many different causes, including the goal of shaping citizens to the civilising missions, that upheld and reinforced colonial ideologies in support of empire building.Footnote8 Missionaries used slide shows as an effective means of demonstrating their religious conquests and of instrumentalising their beliefs.Footnote9 Beyond the adoption of specific governments or religious groups, slide lectures were used as a call to arms for a variety of causes, typically produced by socially conscious photographers and charitable groups looking to raise funds.Footnote10 The reading of these images and their related religious, social and political ambitions were heavily reliant upon the narrative attached to them during their presentation. Such wide-reaching social impact is made clear when we consider that the largest number of commercial slide sets available from American commercial dealers, from the 1860s through to the 1900s, included material ‘especially designed for the temperance crusades’.Footnote11
The slide lecture’s influence on the discipline of art history and the study of photography has been profound.Footnote12 As early as 1848, photographers such as the Langenheim brothers were experimenting with the magic lantern for commercial use, and by the 1880s art historians were embracing the technology.Footnote13 Previous to the adoption of lantern slides, lecturers of all types relied on physical reproductions and their own oratorical style to help audiences gain appreciation for their topics.Footnote14 The shift from lecturing with drawings, plaster casts, prints, maps and printed photographs to lantern slides transformed teaching structurally; it allowed a large audience to view, analyse and compare art objects as never before.Footnote15
Past histories of photographic slides have focused on the idea of representation, and the conflation of (art) objects with their images, as an interesting point of tension.Footnote16 For this instruction methodology to successfully function, slides had to be accepted as the objects they represented. This rhetorical and technological conversion of artworks allowed art historians to make persuasive arguments based on the evidence that existed only through their illustrated slide lectures. Through such lectures, the audiences’ gaze became a key instrument of instruction as the art historian was placed in a rhetorical position of accounting for both the artist and the artwork, enabling the projected ‘picture to speak, to act, to desire’.Footnote17 The slide lecture as a pedagogical tool not only taught audiences to look carefully, it also trained viewers to experience lectures as a narrative of visual evidence and shared experience.Footnote18
Today, we sit at a crossroads in terms of this form of visual pedagogy. This last decade has seen the dismantling of slide collections across different institutions.Footnote19 Treatment of these once costly and time-consuming assemblies has varied greatly. Some organisations have chosen to digitise and catalogue the pictorial data in virtual systems; some have shuffled the filing cabinets into archives, treating the slides as historically significant objects; and others have discarded these collections completely as facsimiles no longer useful. In almost all cases, the narratives which once accompanied these illustrations have been lost. As a result, there has been a surge of interest in the history of the slide as a social, political and cultural practice on the brink.Footnote20 In part, because of the transformation of slides into an ‘obsolete’ media, scholars, curators and artists have begun to look more carefully at these orphaned objects.Footnote21 Many have turned to their own personal or family slide collections to reconsider the meaning and function of these records.Footnote22 Others have adopted abandoned collections, reworking them for the gallery space, in a continuation of the material turn in photography, which has seen such a rich engagement with the album, the archive and the photographic document.Footnote23 Galleries and museums have also taken notice, curating surveys contextualising the slide in the history of artistic practice.Footnote24 Finally, the explosion of open educational resources, freely provided by non-profit organisations like Smarthistory.org and MAP Academy,Footnote25 and accessible educational resources such as ArtStor, which are available through institutional libraries, as well as the global push to digitise and dismantle collections in museums and galleries, are changing the way a new generation of scholars access, create and use slides.
The articles in this special issue explore the history and influence of the photographic slide lecture, its material, art historical, scientific and pedagogical impact, as well as its larger legacy in a period of technological transformation. The authors in this issue consider the implications of studying slides as products of deliberate and considerable labour, rooted in photography’s utopian potential for education and knowledge building, as well as its darker side which promoted racist and exclusionary values and standards about aesthetics, culture and technology. Considered together, the authors demonstrate that slides are inextricably entwined with their method of viewing and that understanding the slide show experience is central to the study of slides.
By mining the University of Brighton’s former 35-mm slide collection, Annebella Pollen’s article questions what cultural histories stand to lose with the technological shift to digital slides and the dismantling of physical slide libraries. Through an analysis of surviving slides now in her possession, Pollen calls attention to the way individuals and institutions have shaped pedagogical collections, and how these collections may be revived by future interest. Eduardo Ralickas’s article similarly addresses the manufacturing of slides. By utilising Martin Heidegger’s work on technological determinism, Ralickas forms a chronology of copy apparatuses from 1930 to the early 2000s. This approach unveils the process of slide production, emphasising how the progression of technologies has shaped the performance of art history. Stéphanie Hornstein’s close reading of Charles Piazzi Smyth’s slides of the Great Pyramid of Giza shows how slide shows were used to promote and advance nineteenth-century pseudo-scientific arguments through the rhetoric and performance of scientific authority. Her analysis demonstrates the slippage between science, religion, propaganda and popular education during a heightened period of empire building. Kim Timby’s article explores the pedagogical revolution caused by the adoption of the slide lecture in French art history between the 1880s and the early 1890s. By addressing slides, and the performance of their accompanying lectures, as products of the evolving empirical methodology of a new generation of art historians, Timby demonstrates how slides helped promote the aspirational goals of practitioners for the nascent discipline.
As a collective, these articles reveal the slide as part of a larger material turn in photographic history, one that is entangled with, and inseparable from, the relationships between technological advancement and cultural ideologies. They further provide insight into how photography helped develop a wide interdisciplinary approach to education, shaped by shifting and competing societal norms, technological ambitions and cultural biases. The articles in this issue emphasise the value of investigating slides as both autonomous objects and part of performative experiences worthy of independent study. In doing so, they employ different entry points into the probing of the slide lecture to fascinating effect. It is our hope that they encourage further research into the history of the slide lecture.
Notes
1 – James Lyons and John Plunkett, Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet, Exeter Studies in Film History (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007).
2 – Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1935–36), in Illuminations, 1st edn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 219–53 (226).
3 –The Magic Lantern at Work: Witnessing, Persuading, Experiencing and Connecting, ed. by Martyn Jolly and Elisa deCourcy, 1st edn (New York, NY: Routledge, 2020).
4 – Elizabeth Shepard, ‘The Magic Lantern Slide in Entertainment and Education, 1860–1920’, History of Photography, 11, no. 2 (1 April 1987), 91–108.
5 – Artemis Willis, ‘“What the Moon Is Like”: Technology, Modernity, and Experience in a Late-Nineteenth-Century Astronomical Entertainment’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 15, no. 2 (3 April 2017), 175–203; Martin Bush, ‘The Astronomical Lantern Slide Set and the Eidouranion in Australia’, Early Popular Visual Culture,17, no. 1 (2019), 9–33; Emily Hayes, ‘“No Branch of Science Enters More Closely Than Geography into the Art of War”: The First World War, Lantern Slides and the Royal Geographical Society, London’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 12, no. 4 (2 October 2014), 434–45; Alina Novik, ‘“The Awakening of Our Taste for Natural Science”: The Magic Lantern and Popular Education in Imperial Russia (1721–1871)’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 17, no. 1 (2019), 34–44; Meredith A. Bak, ‘“Ten Dollars’ Worth of Fun”: The Obscured History of the Toy Magic Lantern and Early Children’s Media Spectatorship’, Film History, 27, no. 1 (2015), 111–34; and Mervyn Heard, ‘A Prurient Look at the Magic Lantern’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 3, no. 2 (1 September 2005), 179–95.
6 – Joe Kember, ‘“Go Thou and Do Likewise”: Advice to Lantern and Film Lecturers in the Trade Press, 1897–1909’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 8, no. 4 (1 November 2010), 419–30.
7 – Shepard, ‘Magic Lantern Slide’, 105.
8 – Gabrielle Moser, Projecting Citizenship: Photography and Belonging in the British Empire (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019); Amy Cox, ‘Purifying Bodies, Translating Race: The Lantern Slides of Sir Everard Im Thurn’, History of Photography, 31, no. 4 (1 December 2007), 348–64; Laura Dunham, ‘Projecting Memory: Lantern Lectures and Performing New Zealand’s First World War Battlefield Memorials’, Journal of Australian Studies, 44, no. 4 (1 October 2020), 492–514; and Mark Sealy, ‘The Congo Atrocities, A Lecture to Accompany a Series of Sixty Photographic Slides for the Optical Lantern. By W. R. (Revised by Mr. E. D. Morel and Rev. J. H. Harris.) Price 6d.’, in Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time, illustrated edn (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2019), 35–83.
9 – Jennifer S. H. Brown, ‘Mission Indian Progress and Dependency: Ambiguous Images from Canadian Methodist Lantern Slides’, Arctic Anthropology, 18, no. 2 (1981), 17–27; Christopher G. Trott, ‘Projecting an Image: Lantern Slide Shows as Anglican Missionary Representations of Inuit’, in Aboriginal Health, Identity and Resources, ed. by Jill E Oakes (Winnipeg, MB: Department of Native Studies, University of Manitoba, 2000), 245–58; Dong An, ‘The Legacy of the Jesuits: The Practice and Social Influence of Magic Lantern Projectors and Films of the T’ou-Se-We Orphan Arts and Crafts Institute in Shanghai’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 18, no. 3 (2 July 2020), 305–18; and Sarah C. Schaefer, ‘Illuminating the Divine: The Magic Lantern and Religious Pedagogy in the USA, ca. 1870–1920’, Material Religion, 13, no. 3 (2017), 275–300.
10 – Michelle Lamunière, ‘Sentiment as Moral Motivator: From Jacob Riis’s Lantern Slide Presentations to Harvard University’s Social Museum’, History of Photography, 36, no. 2 (1 May 2012), 137–55; Jane Lydon, ‘Charity Begins at Home? Philanthropy, Compassion, and Magic Lantern Slide Performances in Australasia, 1891–1892’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 15, no. 4 (2 October 2017), 479–99; and Shalyn Claggett, ‘The Animal in the Machine: Punishment and Pleasure in Victorian Magic Lantern Shows’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 40, no. 1 (2018), 1–18.
11 – Shepard, ‘Magic Lantern Slide’, 100.
12 – As well as the aforementioned, see also Bradford R. Collins, ‘The Slide versus the Artwork’, Art Journal, 54, no. 3 (1995), 89–89; Cindy D. Abel Morris, ‘The Slide: Image and Object’ (MA thesis, University of New Mexico, 1997); Frederick N. Bohrer, ‘Photographic Perspectives: Photography and the Institutional Formation of Art History’, in Art History and Its Institutions, ed. by Elizabeth Mansfield (London: Routledge 2002), 246–58; and Sonia De Laforcade, ‘Click, Pulse: Frederico Morais and the Comparative Slide Lecture’, Grey Room, 73 (Fall 2018), 96–115.
13 – Howard B. Leighton, ‘The Lantern Slide and Art History’, History of Photography, 8, no. 2 (1 April 1984), 107–18 (108).
14 – Trevor Fawcett, ‘Visual Facts and the Nineteenth-Century Art Lecture’, Art History, 6, no. 4 (December 1983), 442–60.
15 – Donald Preziosi, ‘The Question of Art History’, Critical Inquiry, 18, no. 2 (January 1992), 363–86; and Katsura Miyahara, ‘The Impact of the Lantern Slide on Art-History Lecturing in Britain’, The British Art Journal, 8, no. 2 (2007), 67–71 (68).
16 – Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, ‘The Slide Library: A Posthumous Assessment for Our Digital Future’, in Teaching Art History with New Technologies: Reflections and Case Studies, ed. by Kelly Donahue-Wallace, Laetitia Amelia La Follette and Andrea Pappas (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 33–42.
17 – Robert S. Nelson, ‘The Slide Lecture, or the Work of Art “History” in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Critical Inquiry, 26, no. 3 (Spring 2000), 414–34 (419).
18 – Ibid., 415–17; and Jennifer F. Eisenhauer, ‘Next Slide Please: The Magical, Scientific, and Corporate Discourses of Visual Projection Technologies’, Studies in Art Education, 47, no. 3 (1 April 2006), 198–214.
19 – For more on this topic, see Annebella Pollen’s article in this issue.
20 – Sophie Hackett, ‘Queer Looking’, Aperture, 218 (Spring 2015), 40–45.
21 – Martha Langford, ‘When the Carousel Stops Turning … What Shall We Say About the Slide Show?’, Intermédialités : Histoire et Théorie Des Arts, Des Lettres et Des Techniques/Intermediality: History and Theory of the Arts, Literature and Technologies, 24–25 (Spring 2015), https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/im/2014-n24-25-im02279/1034158ar/; Annebella Pollen, ‘The Rising Tide of Photographs’, Revue Captures, 1, no. 1 (May 2016), https://doi.org/10.7202/1059827ar; Benedict Burbridge and Annebella Pollen, Photography Reframed: New Visions in Contemporary Photographic Culture (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018); and Annebella Pollen, ‘Photography’s Mise En Abyme: Metapictures of Scale in Repurposed Slide Libraries’, in Photography Off the Scale: Technologies and Theories of the Mass Image, ed. by Jussi Parikka and Tomáš Dvořák (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 113–39.
22 – Martha Langford and John W. Langford, A Cold War Tourist and His Camera (Montréal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011); and James William Opp, ‘Finding the View: Landscape, Place, and Colour Slide Photography in Southern Alberta’, in Placing Memory and Remembering Place in Canada, ed. by John C. Walsh and James William Opp (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2010), 271–90.
23 – Susan Dobson: Slide | Lecture, The Image Centre, https://theimagecentre.ca/exhibition/susan-dobson-slide-lecture/.
24 – Slideshow: Projected Images in Contemporary Art, ed. by Darsie Alexander (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005); and Nathalie Boulouch et al., Slides: The History of Projected Photography (Lausanne: Noir sur blanc, Musee de l’Elysee, 2017).
25 – Smarthistory: A Multimedia Web-Book about Art and Art History, Smarthistory, https://smarthistory.org/reframing-art-history/; and MAP Academy – Histories of Indian Art, MAP Academy, https://mapacademy.io/.