Lantern mobilities

Abstract

The heterogeneity of lantern slide heritage poses researchers a considerable challenge. The lantern’s status as an ‘open medium’ (Kember 2019), one given to a multitude of possible uses by all kinds of user-groups, often makes it difficult to identify dominant themes or patterns of lantern practice for the material artefacts that remain to us. Lantern slide collections are frequently dispersed, fragmented, derived from donations and purchases large or small that can appear to have little to do with each other. Some parts of collections lend themselves most obviously to storage within photographic collections; others have more in common with collections of historical toys; still, others seem best suited to excavations of social histories or to the deep archives of large educational institutions. When lantern artefacts are collected together under the auspices of cinema museums, the emphasis on the lantern as a distinct medium (albeit one placed into a distinct lineage also including technologies such as panoramas, stereoscopes, film, television and the internet) is more prominent, though here there can also be a risk of losing the cultural contexts into which the lantern was originally placed. Almost always, regardless of the archive in which slides are contextualised, there will be a certain number of images that defy simple explanation, needing lateral thinking in research. Patternmaking in the archives, while always a part of any research project using primary research materials, is therefore at a premium in the context of research on the lantern: there are still so many patterns still to make. Of course, there are numerous methods of sense-making to be applied here, and these will sometimes map neatly onto the archival priorities associated with the collections. Thus, for example, works concerning the magic lantern’s prominent role in connection with popularisers of science (Morus 2006), with social welfare organisations (Eifler 2017), and with cultures of photography (Fiell and Ryan 2013) have all begun the tasks of linking such artefacts with much broader networks of influence, sometimes stretching across national borders, as well as over decades. This second part of a two-part special issue of Early Popular Visual Culture concerning the international magic lantern (following issue 17:1 on assorted national traditions) offers some other approaches for thinking through alternative networks of magic lantern use. It seeks to do this in two ways: the first section presents four articles that develop new histories of transnational lantern exhibition, with a particular emphasis on the mobility of exhibitors within especially significant networks; the three papers in the following Digital Portfolio consider the contemporary mobility of lantern slide imagery, paying particular attention to digital mobilisation of lantern slide images for new users. Each section offers a series of specific case studies, but