Nineteenth-Century Lantern Slides and Our Understanding of the History of Visual Media

The late nineteenth-century lantern shows were public platforms for intermixing the arts and sciences. Their display of still images spanned various spheres of knowledge and culture, from art history to astronomy to the actualities of the day, and the events could take the form of stage art performances, media spectacles or science lectures. The aim of this article is to examine how the nineteenth-century lantern show intersected the arts and sciences and what this could imply for what I propose to call an intersectional media history of images. To that end, the study sets out to bridge the two research traditions of image studies and media history. In three example cases the article shows:

1. how lantern images of world exhibitions, which played on a double representation of extensive sites and sight as the sense of extension, were part of a set of conceptual interlinks between the media, arts and sciences of vision;
2. how a series of astronomy lectures embedded scientific photographs of celestial bodies in a staging of the sublime;
3. how lectures on a South Polar expedition intertwined art-historical image conventions with a photographic slide series documenting, among other things, cartographic findings. These examples also align Swedish materials with the recent discussions of international lantern practices. Finally, the article considers how the case of the lantern shows can inform a broader intersectional media history of images.

The article “The art and science of the nineteenth-century lantern show: Towards an intersectional media history of images” is published in Early Popular Visual Culture and is freely available online here:

Taylor & Francis