For the official version of record, see here:
Petersson, S. (2025). Pictorial Multimodality and the Case of the Lantern Lectures: Scale and Sequence, Image and Text. Media Theory, 9(2), 55–78. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v9i2.1271

Pictorial Multimodality and the Case of the Lantern Lectures: Scale and Sequence, Image and Text

SONYA PETERSSON
Stockholm University, SWEDEN

Abstract

Multimodality has in the last couple of decades been recognized as the new norm of the digital age. The term has broadly come to stand for how image, text, moving image, and so on, interact on the digital screen. This article investigates a media-historical practice of image projections before digital media, lantern lectures, in which still images were intermixed with texts of different kinds as well as with light, sequence and scale operations. The objective is to use the media-historical case of the lantern lectures to shed light on pictorial multimodality avant la lettre in order to discuss what this implies for our knowledge position towards the multimodal norm of the present. Additionally, the study’s focus on pictorial multimodality continues the analysis in the field of image studies of what an image is and develops a discussion about the transgressive relation between pictures and the concepts used to denote them.

Keywords

multimodality, image studies, media history, image and text, lantern lectures

It was once a novelty to show still images in public. In front of astonished audiences, wall-size projections of assembled views of the visible and invisible world and the universe were displayed in pictorial sequences, including everything from the ruins of Pompeii to astronomic charts, to life in Punjab, to actualities such as wars and world exhibitions. This media practice, which I will refer to as lantern lectures, was popular throughout Europe and North America roughly between 1880 and 1910, but if it is at all remembered today, it is generally lumped together with a range of other extinct media (such as moving panoramas or zoopraxiscopes) as precursors of cinema. Beyond the precinema perspective, however, the case of the lantern lectures offers insights into pictorial multimodality avant la lettre. The sequences of slides – photographs, drawings and other depictions as well as pictures of various texts – were accompanied by a lecturer’s speech, titles and sometimes music.

The ambition of this article is to use the case of the lantern lectures to study pictorial multimodality before the latter was proclaimed a new norm and even a new turn of the present digital media landscape. This comprises two lines of inquiry. The first is to use the case of the lantern lectures to shed media-historical light on the phenomenon of pictorial multimodality and the second is to discuss what this implies for our knowledge position towards the so-called multimodal norm of the present. Part of the problem is that the phenomenon of pictorial multimodality seems to be at odds with what might be called the traditional picture concept, or a conceptual entity of the kind one can find in a dictionary. It circumscribes a pattern of association between pictorial media, material fixity, depiction and spatiality. It was well established in the language that surrounded the lantern lectures and is still around in the present vernacular (see the “narrow image concept” in Sachs-Holmbach, 2016: 185–186). But what does it mean that pictorial media practices and the language offered to denote them seem to follow separate tracks?

“Multimodality” and “modality” are frequently used terms that cover somewhat different terrains across scholarly contexts. In the field of multimodal studies, developed out of social semiotics and linguistics in the late 1990s, the preferred object of study is how image, moving image, sound, text and so on, interact as “modes” or tools of communication and representation in digital environments (Jewitt et al., 2016: 1–13; Bateman et al., 2017: 7–21; Wildfeuer et al., 2019: 3–38). The default model of “mode” within this field is a “semiotic resource for making meaning” (Kress, 2010: 79) or a sort of grammar of representation. This terminology differs from how “modality” is used more generally in discussions on media and aesthetics, where it is commonly related to fundamental experiential categories such as spatiality and temporality, or sensory capacities such as sight and hearing (Elleström, 2010: 14).

As rooted in image studies and the overlapping fields of media history and theory, this study follows another path. Here, pictorial multimodality stands for a co-operative and possibly open-ended combination of media, modalities and representational conventions in the media-historical practice of the lantern lectures. In my terminology, image and text are consequently not “modes” but abstract media entities that appear in, and operate through, media channels, actual media objects and experientially based or embodied modalities such as, for example, spatiality or temporality – which must be left open to media-historical examination (Mitchell, 2015: 126–135; Belting, 2001: 9–36). The latter entails the study of how pictorial multimodality was played out in the media practice of the lantern lectures. In this context, technologies of projection, presentational habits, physical settings and conceptual standards in the bulk of minor texts that surrounded the events – handbooks, adverts, programs, posters, press reviews, daily news – all intersected and directly and indirectly functioned as co-operators of pictorial multimodality (Siegert, 2016: 11, 13, 15; Parikka, 2023: 39–41).

My examples are taken from a study on lantern lectures in Sweden, but the national context should not be over-emphasized.^[i] The same kind of media practice was well established in other places, as amply demonstrated in recent lantern scholarship (Kember, 2019; Dellmann & Kessler, 2020; Teughels & Wils, 2022). Additionally, the slides, other equipment and handbooks were circulated transnationally. The Swedish lectures included a mix of slides from English, French, German and American manufacturers together with domestic ones. The international type of the events and the transnational mix of materials were more characteristic of the lantern lectures than any national trends.

The first short section below introduces the lantern lectures as a media-historical practice. This is followed by two key sections that deal with what I understand as characteristic but in no way exhaustive modal, medial and representational picture-based operations of the lantern lectures: first, the combination of scale and sequence and, second, the combination of image, text and light. This grouping is artificial. As will become clear, the modalities of sequence, scale and light and the media of image and text intersect with each other. Finally, and for the future, I discuss why past media histories of pictorial multimodality matter in the present.

Introducing the lantern lectures

Even though the magic lantern had a long and, at the time, well-known history, it was enthusiastically promoted as a new medium throughout most of the period 1880–1910. In handbooks, adverts, programs, posters, press reviews and daily news, the events and the lantern were explained, marketed and evaluated in terms of novelty. New versions of the apparatus, with new names such as “triple lantern,” “optical lantern” and “sciopticon” were regularly introduced as improved by “modern science.” The much-repeated point was that the new type of picture projection in “brilliant limelight” surpassed its predecessors, in being more “life-like” and almost “living.” ^[i] At the same time, the old name, “magic lantern,” was in parallel use throughout the period and strongly attached to the living memory of the lantern’s longer media history, including its claimed seventeenth-century inventor, the Jesuit and polymath Athanasius Kircher, and the still renowned early nineteenth-century phantasmagorias of Étienne Gaspard Robertson, with their gothic imagery and theatrical stage settings.

As a media practice, the lantern lectures took place in public rooms and lecture halls in venues such as schools, chapels, theatres and hotels. The display of pictures in these types of larger locations was made possible by the development of optics and light sources and included the establishment of a collective viewing practice that was promoted as a novelty in itself. Adverts pointed out that the pictures would appear “on a screen stretched from the ceiling to the floor” and could “be viewed by everybody at the same time.”^[ii] Such collective viewing must be understood as including all individual experiences, which may not have been similar, but were still shaped by the physical setting and its lighting conditions: the darkened room, where the light beam from the lantern provided the only illumination. Darkness, light and the requirement for silence channeled attention to the single spot of light on the screen, where the sequence of pictures would appear, accompanied by the lecturer’s voice (Nelson, 2004: 421). One can say with Belting that the lantern lectures provided a “public locus of images,” an expression focused on public and collective viewing, which he used to describe – notably – the movie theater (2001: 51).

Despite the similarities in setting and experiential conditions between the lantern lectures and what we now recognize as cinema, it is important not to model the lantern lectures’ modal, medial and representational operativity on the film paradigm. This has previously led to a teleological treatment of the lantern as not yet capable of moving images and, besides, the sequences of still images at the center of the lantern lectures were rarely held together by narrative in a more traditional sense – another significant feature of institutionalized twentieth-century cinema.^[iii] Instead, the programs of the lantern lectures combined spectacle and instruction. They could be tightly knit around a single topic (“Pictures of India,” “A Trip to Tunis”) but were at other times compositions of so many different spheres of culture and knowledge that the point seemed to be their very assemblage. For example, a lantern lecture program that toured Sweden and Denmark in the late 1880s consisted of, first, two informative pictorial series “with lectures” on “the wonders of outer space” and “Greenland and its inhabitants.” Then followed The Rat-Catcher of Hamelin (a folk tale made popular by the Grimm brothers), so-called actuality views from a theatre fire in Vienna 1881, a pictorial tour through “The Holy Land” and finally a set of comical pictures.^[iv] Such programs could very well contain stories such as the folk tale above, but they were normally not organized around a coherent and overarching narrative. Even popular travel lectures, with titles such as “Around the World in 80 Minutes,” did not necessarily unfold a more developed narrative than a continuing change of destinations. In this regard, the lantern lectures overlap with what Tiago de Luca describes as early cinema’s soon abandoned practice of showing “anything and everything” (2022: 21, 146–147) in concatenations of short films visualizing the same type of assembled topics as the example above. Nevertheless, a particular feature of the lantern lectures was that the programs as well as the order of the slides could be endlessly altered. Traveling slide performers continuously updated and rearranged their programs and informed the public that new pictures had been added “since the last visit.”^[v]

In addition to the sequence of assembled rather than narratively organized slides, the elusiveness of the pictorial projection was another characteristic feature of the events. The projection appeared only momentarily before it was replaced by the next one in the sequence. This is a feature that escapes the durability associated with the traditional picture concept and its paradigmatic examples of paintings, drawings and prints, where images are perpetuated in oil on canvas or ink on paper.

Scale and sequence

In the handbook literature, the relation between the slide and the projection was described in terms of technological causality and of mediation. Of these, mediation better represents the concerns of these texts as it directs attention to the fundamental differences between the slide and its projection. One such difference was scale. Many handbooks understood the virtues of the lantern projections to include a new ability to scale up and down, thus functioning as a concrete “extension of man” well before 1964 when Marshall McLuhan made the phrase famous (2003: 12, 19, 21). The handbooks highlighted examples such as “photomicrography,” a new technology for photographically enlarging minuscule parts of nature, which was further enlarged through the lantern or “reproduced as large as life.” The latter does not refer to the life size of that which was reproduced but to the human scale of the audience: A “diatom no larger than a grain of sand may be shown in such a size in the lecture-room that a large audience may together examine its details” (Marcy, 1877: 51). In the same way, another handbook pointed out that the audience “can thus at the same moment study the structure of an organism which may be in reality invisible to unaided sight” (Hepworth, 1888: ix).

These discussions about the modality of scale were not confined to the handbook literature. On the contrary, one of the selling points of the lantern lectures was what adverts and posters never missed: to flaunt their “pictures of natural size,” meaning pictorial projections that related to the human scale of the audience. These and other nineteenth-century sources commonly speak about “size.” But as “size” here referred to contexts where the size of the projected picture was juxtaposed to some other size (the size of “life” or the actual size of that which was represented) scale is what matters. Scale is always relative, whereas size is about dimensions and not necessarily relative unless described in such a way.

Notwithstanding the commercial slogan of “natural size,” studies of the pictorial projections of the events reveal how this catchphrase was both confirmed and bypassed by a more multidimensional relativization of the human scale. The slides bearing the inscriptions “Grotte inférieur de Grindelwald, Suisse” (Fig. 1) and “Principauté de Monaco” (Fig. 2) broadly represent the slide industry’s preference for touristic views of the world and its attractions. The Grindelwald slide shows a man standing outside the entrance to an enormous glacier cave and the Paris slide a scene from the world exhibition of 1889, with the Eiffel Tower and the pavilion of Monaco. Both establish a point of connection between that which takes place in the representations and the external viewer. The figures who turn their backs to the audience, the man outside the cave with a wanderer’s stick and the two ladies heading toward the pavilion, acquire the role of onlookers within the images. The external viewer is not invited to share the actual sight of the represented figures, as their perspective is more comprehensive. Rather, the external viewer is invited to share their role as spectators. In the setting of the lantern lectures, this implies that the act of seeing performed by the figures within the representation was mimicked by the audience just through its behavior as an audience to a slideshow. Hence a point of connection was established between that which appeared in representation and the audience. Further, when slides such as these were blown up to wall size through the lantern projection, it was neither likely nor even relevant if they mathematically matched the scale of the audience. They were, nonetheless, taken to support the experience of sharing the same human scale, that which was referred to as “natural size.” In both examples the perspective is also slightly from below and thus places the external viewer just outside the lower part of the picture frame, which confirms the position of a seated audience.

While the pictorial projection was understood to be related to the scale of the audience, both slides highlight the radical difference in scale between the human spectators (in the picture and in the lecture room) and the gigantic glacier cave and the Eiffel Tower, emphasized in their magnitude by extending beyond the picture frame. These are notable representational features that thematize scalar differences by re-using the imagery of romantic landscape painting and, above all, its visualization of the aesthetic category of the sublime, as in the works of painters such as Caspar David Friedrich. The Grindelwald slide, in particular, directly circulated this image pattern of small human figures, often shown from behind, as spectators of the enormous ravines, vast waters and mighty architectural edifices of Friedrich and his fellow painters. As Michelle Henning has noted, this kind of image circulation has been part of the history of photography – in the form of prints or slides – since its inception (Henning, 2018: 25–26, 35), and it even includes the seemingly more snapshot-like Paris slide, which repeats the same type of imagery but in an indirect way. The women acquire the role of spectators as they are heading in the direction of the site. Whether the site in its time and place depicted in the picture would be the pavilion or the Eiffel Tower does not matter much – as the slide was displayed for more or less contemporary audiences in other places, the newly erected Eiffel Tower, heightened in the picture by the radical difference in scale, would no doubt be the center of attention. The Paris slide thereby not only indirectly re-used the romantic imagery of the sublime but also participated in the nineteenth-century “technological” reloading of the concept. In a now classical study, David Nye (1994) has mapped the technologization of the sublime in connection to how modern public engineering and the developing tourist industry produced spectacular sites such as the Brooklyn Bridge, the Eiffel Tower and Niagara Falls, which were all mediated by media spectacles such as the lantern lectures.

In addition to this triple juxtaposition of scales – scales within the representations, the scale of the projection and the audience’s scale – the fact that the pictures were always embedded in a sequence of other pictures brought plenty of opportunities to make further comparisons of size, magnitudes and distances. Judging from lecture programs and adverts just as much as from the slides, the lectures seem to have favored variations in point of view – bird’s eye followed by close-ups – just as much as variations in the range of subjects that could be covered in one program. Put differently, the sequential display provided the immediate and, at least for the audience, more or less mandatory frame of reference. Portraits of, say, the royal family, which were displayed in “natural size” and thus shared a body-based relation with the audience, were followed, within the same sequence, by images representing scales of a totally different magnitude, such as a bird’s-eye view over the castle or a map of the town. The great distance visualized by the “Eruption of Vesuvius, 1872” (Fig. 3) or the comprehensiveness beyond any human point of view in the astronomical chart of planetary orbits (Fig. 4) differ from the slides above not only in the scale of what they represent, but also in how their representations relate to the viewer. Both the Vesuvius slide and the astronomical chart appear as views from nowhere, whereas the Grindelwald and the Paris slides both fix a position for the external viewer in the “same” representational space that is occupied by the figures in the pictures. And as projected in a lecture room, the distance or comprehensiveness in these and similar pictorial representations appeared just in front of the audience, which emphasizes the contrast between the closeness of the picture on the screen and the scale of its representation. In other words, whatever else the lantern lectures were about – subjects like travel, astronomy, natural wonders – they were simultaneously confirming and relativizing the human scale.

Until now I have discussed scale and sequence in the lantern lectures as products of a historically specific media practice. Both modalities can, however, shed light on parallel phenomena of pictorial multimodality. Scale is, for instance, an essential operator in the broad field of past and present pictorial reproduction, which includes examples such as early modern wall-size paintings shrunk down to monochrome folio-size engravings or high-resolution JPEG files that display photographs of other pictures. Even if scale is differently realized in these cases, as engravings are fixed but digital technologies permit the user to perform scaling operations by zooming in and out of pictures (Drucker, 2014: 154), both involve more than the representational relation between the depiction and its object – which is a lesson from the lantern lectures. What the scale operations of engravings and JPEG files also involve is the relation between the scale of the actual picture, comparable to the projection on the screen, the scale of the viewer and the latter’s previous knowledge about the scale of the represented object (or a relationship grounded in the viewer’s embodied experience of scalar relationships in the world; Johnson, 2018: 18–19, 38–57). Admittedly, scale is not recognized as a modality the same way that images are bound to spatiality (or texts to temporality) and I have no universal claims. But both in the field of pictorial reproduction and in the case of the lantern lectures, scale has the function of a modality in the sense of an embodied operator. What makes scale an “operator” in these examples cannot be confined to the operativity associated with digital technologies and the user’s manipulation of the picture (as in zooming), or to the operativity connected to diagrammatical visualization (as in the astronomical chart), that is, the image’s ability to scale, chart or map its object of representation (Parikka, 2023: 3, 7). More fundamentally, the modality of scale described here (the scale of the picture in relation to the scale of the viewer and the latter’s embodied knowledge of the scale of the represented object) is dependent on the cognitive operation of comparison as prompted by the image or its pictorial appearance.

As for the sequence, the lantern lectures were certainly not unique. From the sequential point of view, they relate to such well-known examples as pre-modern wall painting, including Giotto’s fresco cycle of the salvation history in Padua (1303–05), or graphic novels, including Art Spiegelman’s Maus stories (1977–91), or Nan Goldin’s photographic series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981–2022), which has been displayed as a slideshow (as well as circulating in print). Despite their differences – the two first are narrative and fixed in a certain order whereas the latter are alterable – these objects and presentational practices have the sequential organization in common, in the sense that single images are integrated into a sequential totality, whether composed of fixed wall or page panels or rapidly shifting and rearrangeable pictorial projections. From the perspective of pictorial multimodality, such organizational sequences stand in a complementary relation to what Gottfried Boehm describes as the sequentiality of image perception, or the capacity of a single image to direct perceptual attention in ways that shift between resting on pictorial elements one by one and moving between different elements (2019: 27–30). What is important here is that both these aspects of sequentiality co-operate with the spatiality of the traditional picture concept.

Apart from nuancing received ideas about pictoriality together with the pictorial sequence, the modality of scale can further be connected to two recent discussions in media history and theory where it has come to the fore in different ways. Scale is often evoked in relation to the present “flood” of images or the trillions of digital photographs that are uploaded, stored, networked and sometimes actually viewed on the Internet. As Jussi Parikka & Tomáš Dvořák have noted, scale in this context concerns quantities, measures and the proliferation of digital photographs on a global, hitherto unprecedented, scale (2021: 4). Another emerging discussion engaging with scale focuses attention on how categories such as the global and the planet take shape in the arts and the media today and, with the present as a critical foil, how they were formed in the past. An excellent example is de Luca’s studies of the “worldlings” of early cinema in both diverging and continuous relations to film-based contemporary works (2022: 25). The lantern lectures have something to offer here. I am thinking not only of their habit – reminiscent of early film – of drawing disparate parts of the world and the universe together in pictorial sequences, but chiefly of how they scaled up and down as well as juxtaposed multiple, human and non-human, scales. My point is that the perspective of what can be called the scaling image, including attention both to the scales of its past and present (digital and other) networks of dispersion and to its modal scaling operations, would have implications for understanding the various makings of the global in past and present media cultures.

Image and text

In a study on the anthropology of screens, Mauro Carbone & Graziano Lingua (2023) have interestingly noted how digital and other screens are tied up with a seventeenth-century etymology that designates them as hybrid surfaces for the display of pictures and texts (24), which was also matched by the seventeenth and eighteenth-century use of fire screens decorated with verses and figures. For Carbone & Lingua, this is important because they contend that screens in the media history of the twentieth century have been reductively treated within what they call imagocentric frameworks (5–6, 73), which have only recently been overcome by the “new norm” of the multimodal digital screen. In my view, the emphasis on either imagocentric or logocentric frameworks in canonical sources (Platonic thinking, Calvinist iconoclasm or the linguistic turn of Rorty and others versus Byzantine iconophiles or the pictorial/iconic turns discussed by Mitchell and Boehm [in Curtis, 2010]), risks missing the point of discovering how such oppositions have been historically sidestepped. The lantern lectures offer a case that both demonstrates image and text hybridity on screen and, in the language of the texts around them, a sidestepping of precisely the oppositional image and text relationships noted above.

The pictorial sequences of the lantern lectures were always accompanied by different sorts of texts, which took the form of titles appearing in programs and slides, the speech of the lecturer or lanternist and text slides. Titles such as “The West Coast in Word and Image” also emphasize the hybrid character of the events. It is, therefore, not so surprising that the lantern lectures were reviewed and advertised in daily papers and handbooks in ways that, as a rule, framed the relationship between the pictorial projections, speech and other texts as supplemental: images and texts were complementary rather than opposed to each other. Normally, the events were described either as “illustrated lectures” or “commented pictorial presentations.” In the first case, the content of speech was assigned the leading role and the pictures the more passive function of a supplementary material that concretized and visualized what was described as abstract and easily forgotten words. Most handbooks recommended this order (Hepworth, 1888: 266; Anon., 1893: 105–106), but in adverts and programs the reverse order of “commented pictorial presentations” was more common. In this case, the recurring promise was that the pictures would be “explained” by speech. The pictures were hence assigned the leading role but still considered to need explanation – presumably because of what Mitchell calls their “visual surplus” (2005: 76–106), or Barthes their “floating chain of signifieds” (1977: 39). In both cases, however, image or text was expected to step in when the other was considered insufficient. All the same, it is still important to remember that neither of these supplementary models exhausts the image and text relations that were at work in the lantern lectures, and which can be derived – not from statements in press and handbooks – but from how the pictures themselves made hybrid use of texts.

The title slide (Fig. 5) is of a common type and can be described as staging a medial, modal and representational play on the borders of the traditional picture concept. The title slide introduces the series The North Pole Expedition of Nordenskiöld or a pictorial narrative co-operating with an official story of the Swedish polar explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld’s navigation through the North-East Passage during 1878–80. Of greater concern here is that the title slide exposes an assemblage of medial and representational forms and conventions: the title, inscriptions, a map with the abstract elements of longitude lines, a depiction of a landscape and two perspectives (the frontal view of the landscape and the bird’s-eye view of the map). The title element demands special attention as it is inserted, or rather erected, in the upper space of the icy landscape. Whereas the geographical names on the map and the sea are shown as ordinary inscriptions on top of the picture, the title above is included in the depictional space, curiously standing and even casting faint shadows on the ice. The title is thus pictured in a way that resembles the representation of the surrounding landscape. As a part of the landscape, the title is included in the frontal view; as a text, it forms a sequence of letters that reads as a reference to the expedition and its leader. The inclusion of these letters erected in space and the contrast against the letters that form the inscriptions, hence plays with the unexpected or with the awareness that traditionally depiction and writing are functioning through different modalities and representational repertoires. In other words, the title slide presupposes and contrasts the differences between writing and depiction, while it simultaneously draws them together in the same depictional space.

The hybridity of the title slide, with writing and depiction highlighted against the assemblage of medial and representational forms, was actually quite familiar in the broader media culture around the lantern lectures. Similar hybrids were appearing in the illustrated press, a genre that exploded in the 1840s and continued to expand throughout the century, children’s books and similar print media objects, which have in art-historical and literary disciplinary traditions been considered of less importance. Letterheads that expose texts against landscapes or cityscapes, initial letters that form figures and inscriptions on top of montages of pictures were a recurring part of the print ephemera of the day (see examples in Benjamin, 2008: 226–235; Mainardi, 2017: 107, 117, 142, 149, 153) and created an active context for this and other title slides in at least two ways. First, title slides can be described as a product of hybrid print conventions already in place and, second, they were therefore able to evoke the image of such print hybrids for anyone familiar with them. This contextualization is thus of a different type than the parallel above between the lantern lectures and Carbone & Lingua’s fire screens and digital interfaces – that is, different screen practices with image and text hybridity in common – which is a juxtaposition of relevance only in the present.

In the perspective of image and text hybridity, the new type of text slides (Fig. 6) is especially interesting as an example of pictorial media on the border of the traditional picture concept. These novel and usually framed slides dominated by text could contain the words of hymns, as in the example here, or song lyrics for the audience to perform at the beginning, or end, of a lecture. Unlike the title slide, here writing does not appear on a depictional ground but is projected against the abstract ground of the screen and light. In the texts surrounding the lantern lectures, such text slides were hard to categorize since they did not match any of the terms currently in use and were referred to descriptively rather than by a common denominator. In fact, outside the technical concerns of the handbook literature, the language of the time had no fixed vocabulary for any lantern slide – pictorial, textual or hybrid – but alternated between several terms borrowed from the field of painting. These might include: “views” – also one of the terms used by the film maker Georges Méliès, in an essay from 1907, to denote cinematographic pictures (2011: 138–141) – “light pictures”, “shadow pictures” or merely “pictures” (“tafla” in Swedish, comparable to “tableau” in French and “Tafel” in German). The text slides did not fit easily into this scheme. Additionally, and more broadly, the concept of image space as it is currently used can both include and exclude text slides from the category of pictures. In the terminology of Kress, space is used for relations between elements simultaneously situated inside a given image frame, whether these elements are texts, schematic entities such as boxes or depicted objects (2010: 75, 90–91, 94). At the same time, space is also, especially in art-historical contexts, reserved for the two-dimensional depictional space in which three-dimensional figures and objects are recognized (Costello, 2021: 90). This uneasy relation between past and present pictorial or image concepts and the text slides makes them borderline cases in the sense of objects that are not easily categorized.

The inclusion of the text slides in the pictorial sequence operated in a more integrating direction. What is at stake here is the interrelation between the immediate context of the sequence and the fact that the images of the lantern slides were made visible through the modality of light. Light served two essential functions: it made the image visible, and it marked the picture’s space on the screen. Therefore, the spot of light (often but not always visible between pictorial projections) can be compared to the ornamental frame of the text slide, as it at once enclosed and exposed a space “reserved” for the appearance of projections expected to be “views” (Mersch, 2016: 165–166). This framing function, that the spot of light enclosed and exposed something as an image by providing a space for it and building on the audience’s previous images of what appears in that space, is analogous to Carbone & Lingua’s two (out of four) fundamental screen functions: namely, showing and hiding (2023: 19–20). In relation to the text slides, this implies that light and screen were involved in a process that can equally well be described in terms of spatializing the text or showing the text as an image, which amounts to hiding the text as a piece of reading. But as the piece of reading was still present on the screen and normally attended to as such in the lecture program, these “image-making” light and screen functions must be understood as alternating with the instructions of the lecturer to attend to what was in the text. Hence, the appearance of the text slides can best be described as a hybridizing oscillation between seeing the text as an image and reading its lines.

The beam of light is also significant as a reference to the lantern’s media history or the living memory of its gothic imagery, which was closely associated with the interplay of optics and light. Light was often noticed as a feature of all slide displays, with or without translucent backgrounds (as in the text slides). The sharp beam of light surrounded by darkness was frequently commented upon: often both in the technical language of “standard candles,” associated with the lantern’s new media status, and in terms evocative of the lantern’s magic heritage, whether this matched the pictures on show or not. For example, a regionally renowned and, for some years, traveling lecture program on life in India began each event with text slides of song lyrics, followed by photographs of a journey by sea and then of daily life and religious customs in Punjab. It was praised in press reviews in words that attested to, on the one hand, the “instructive” anthropological content of pictures and speech and, on the other, the “surprising” experience of seeing one picture after the other being “conjured forth” in “magical light.”^[i] To term the light “magical” and to use metaphors of conjuring were to evoke the lantern’s history of phantasmagoria with its optical illusions and tricks – less related to the topic at hand but still readily evoked by the interplay of light and momentary projection of pictures surrounded by darkness. This way of commenting on the light effects in a darkened room provided both the novel text slides and the other “views” with a specific context of lantern history, which amounts to a media history of “magical” imagery. Hence one can say with Siegert that the modality of light operated in the realm of technologies and materials just as well as in the realm of representation and meaning production (2016: 15).

Finally, the image and text hybridity of the title and text slides above is an essential part of the phenomenon of pictorial multimodality for the simple reason that it (image and text hybridity) is so frequently encountered in past and present media history. To my examples here one can add the genre of the map, including Abraham Ortelius’s printed and engraved atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), as well as the scalable interface of Google Maps. These have in common that they expose an assemblage of depictional and abstract pictorial elements together with writing. Like the title slide, maps combine image and text in the same media objects, and their appearance differs from that of the text slide as an image. This is a case of perceiving the text as a pattern or a surface, reminiscent of an abstract version of Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (1913–16), that is, poetry where the arrangement and typeface of writing on the page sometimes take on iconic form. Consequently, as a lesson from the text slide, it is important to note that image and text hybridity in past and present media cultures cannot be confined to cases where it appears on the surface (as in the title slide). The most familiar example today is probably text to image models of artificial intelligence, such as DALL-E, where textual prompts generate images based on the model’s previous training on photographic data – that is, data also referred to as the flood of digital photographs on the web. As Amanda Wasielewski has shown, the images generated by AI text to image models are therefore bound to the representational conventions of photography already in place (2024: 185–204). From a wider perspective of image and text hybridity, however, text to image relations could just as well be taken to include the sequence of mental images generated from reading certain literature. Friedrich Kittler describes the latter in relation to the genre of gothic novels as one of several precinematic practices in his history of optical media (2010: 101–117). In analogy with textual prompting’s reliance on photographic data, the literature’s evocation of a sequence of mental images is nevertheless based on the reader’s already held memories, visual impressions and previously seen pictures.

Parallel histories of pictorial multimodality

Pictorial multimodality has been studied here with the pictures at the center and with equal emphasis on how modal, medial and representational features were co-operating with each other and with the materials, technologies, and presentational and conceptual practices of the lantern lectures. This is worth emphasizing again because the term “multimodality” is generally understood as being connected to the interaction of images, texts, sound, moving images and so forth, in predominantly digital media channels. The term multimodality facilitates the discussion of media-historical parallelism, but it should be noted that the real force of parallelism is not the definition of terms but the juxtaposed phenomena.

Part of the argument about pictorial multimodality in this study is that it is researchable as a pictorial phenomenon whether or not terminologically articulated in its historical context. To this end I have demonstrated how the lantern lectures established a broader spectrum of variability between what was showable and knowable as a picture and the bounds of the traditional picture concept, with its scant room for pictorial configurations of light, scale and sequence or of image and text hybridity. The recurring references to painting in the lantern lectures are interesting in this respect, as it is the ideal model and standard example of the traditional picture concept. The re-use of imagery as well as the adaptation of the terminology of painting can both be described as, simultaneously, forms of transgression and establishing interconnections. The re-use of romantic imagery involves the transfer of painterly conventions to photographic light projections for altogether different purposes, while the new use was still playing on the various visual and thematic features of the transferred imagery. Likewise, the adaptation of terminology established a relation between the slide projections and the medium of painting, while it was still too mismatched to capture the lantern lectures’ spectrum of modal, medial and representational variations. Just think of the assemblage in the title slide.

The larger implication of this transgression of the traditional picture concept is that it sheds light on the multimodal picture in media history and makes out a parallel to something that takes shape in the present. The traditional picture concept is often pointed out as transgressed by the so-called multimodal norm of the present. As Krešimir Purgar has noted (2019: 30, 143–144), the moving images on monitor screens in the digital era appear as simultaneous or coextensive with the world. They thereby involve another kind of temporality than the slide displays discussed here and another relation to the world than that included in the traditional picture concept (and in more recent image theory), where a fundamental difference between the image and the world is normally presumed. My point is nevertheless that the traditional picture concept was already transgressed by the media practice of the lantern lectures, which also has methodological implications. In this study, the argument of transgression builds on positing a conceptual pattern, a set of relations between ideas of material fixity, depiction, spatiality and ideal examples, and searching in its margins. I propose that the inability of the traditional picture concept to accommodate the pictorial media practices it has been (and still is) employed to denote should be thought of as a productive gap. It is through this gap that we can learn more about how pictures appear and operate in past and present media environments. It is worth remembering that even highly naturalized concepts, such as the traditional picture concept, are theoretical models that pick out some but not other dimensions of actual pictorial appearances and operations.

Another part of my argument is that pictorial multimodality has – not a history – but several discontinuous and parallel histories, which together can provide a decentering and enriching foil for the present, while maintaining the historical integrity of both past and present media objects and their networks, practices, settings and so on – in short, the media-historical specificity Lisa Gitelman has described so well (2006: 8). As indicated above, the case of the lantern lectures is merely one of many possible examples of parallel histories of pictorial multimodality avant la lettre. As discontinuous, plural and specific, what kind of relation between past and present media is implied in “parallel histories”? The expression is taken from Parikka’s (2012) recurring discussions of old and new media in “parallel lines,” but rephrased since my argument unfolds differently. It is obvious that the epistemic horizon of the present, including its scholarly theorization about, and lived experience of, the multimodality of the digital age, can fruitfully spur interest in and study of previously overlooked phenomena of the past. This is a potentially productive relationship between past and present media, which starts in the present. But it will remain no more than a commonplace or risk coming dangerously close to the pitfalls of presentism or media teleology (as when institutionalized cinema serves as a blueprint for various prior lantern practices) if not more clearly articulated. Media-historical parallelism should neither be mistaken for uncritical presentism nor give way to comparisons between old and new media that risk overlooking the historical and medial specificity of each. The multimodality of the digital age cannot simply be projected backwards, whereas past histories of pictorial multimodality serve no critical purpose if they remain enclosed in the past. In my view, the crucial point of parallelism is to take account of the specificity of the past in order to see more in both past and present media. Parallelism in this sense cannot account for media-historical development, causality and succession, but it can provide a framework that not only decenters and enriches but also diversifies the multimodal “norm” of the present. This is a relationship that brings something back from past media histories to bear on the present.

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges support from the Swedish Research Council (grant number 2023-00643) and the Åke Wiberg Foundation (grant number H23-0075).

References

Anon. (1893) The Art of Projection and Complete Magic Lantern Manual. London: E. A. Beckett.

Barthes, R. (1977) Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana.

Bateman, J., J. Wildfeuer & T. Hiippala (2017) Multimodality: Foundations, Research and Analysis: A Problem-Oriented Introduction. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Belting, H. (2014) An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Trans. Thomas Dunlap. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Benjamin, W. (2008) The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media. Trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Carbone, M. & G. Lingua (2023) Toward an Anthropology of Screens: Showing and Hiding, Exposing and Protecting. Trans. Sarah De Sanctis. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Costello, D. (2021) ‘What is Abstraction in Photography?’ in K. Purgar (ed.) The Iconology of Abstraction: Non-Figurative Images and the Modern World. New York: Routledge, pp. 89–103.

Curtis, N. (ed.) (2010) The Pictorial Turn. London: Routledge.

Dellmann, S. & F. Kessler (eds.) (2020) A Million Pictures: Magic Lantern Slides in the History of Learning. New Barnet: John Libbey.

de Luca, T. (2022) Planetary Cinema: Film, Media and the Earth. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Drucker, J. (2014) Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Elleström, L. (2010) ‘The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations,’ in L. Elleström (ed.) Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 11–48.

Gaudreault, A. (2011) Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema. Trans. Timothy Barnard. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Gitelman, L. (2006) Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Henning, M. (2018) Photography: The Unfettered Image. New York: Routledge.

Hepworth, T. C. (1888) The Book of the Lantern: Being a Practical Guide to the Working of the Optical (or Magic) Lantern. London: Wyman & Sons.

Jewitt, C., J. Bezemer & K. O’Halloran (2016) Introducing Multimodality. New York: Routledge.

Johnson, M. (2018) The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought: The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, Morality and Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kember, J. (2019) ‘The Magic Lantern: Open Medium,’ Early Popular Visual Culture 17(1): 1–8.

Kittler, F. (2010) Optical Media: The Berlin Lectures 1999. Trans. Anthony Enns. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Kress, G. (2010) Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. New York: Routledge.

Mainardi, P. (2017) Another World: Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Print Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Marcy, L. J. (1877) Sciopticon Manual, Explaining Lantern Projections in General and the Sciopticon Apparatus in Particular. 6th ed. Philadelphia.

McLuhan, Marshall (2003) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Corte Madera: Gingko Press.

Méliès, G. (2011) ‘Kinematographic Views,’ trans. Stuart Liebman & Timothy Barnard, in A. Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema. Trans. Timothy Barnard. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 133–152.

Mersch, D. (2016) ‘Pictorial Thinking: On the ‘Logic’ of Iconic Structures,’ in Ž. Paić & K. Purgar (eds.) Theorizing Images. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 162–184.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (2005) What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (2015) Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Nelson, R. S. (2000) ‘The Slide Lecture, or the Work of Art ‘History’ in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ Critical Inquiry 26(3): 414–434.

Nye, D. E. (1994) American Technological Sublime. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Parikka, J. (2012) What is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity.

Parikka, J. (2023) Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Parikka, J. & T. Dvořák (2021) ‘Introduction: On the Scale, Quantity and Measure of Images,’ in T. Dvořák & J. Parikka (eds.) Photography Off the Scale: Technologies and Theories of the Mass Image. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Purgar, K. (2019) Pictorial Appearing: Image Theory After Representation. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.

Sachs-Holmbach, K. (2016) ‘Pictorial Act Theory: Images as Communicative Media,’ in Ž. Paić & K. Purgar (eds.) Theorizing Images. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 185–201.

Siegert, B. (2015) Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. New York: Fordham University Press.

Teughels, N. & K. Wils (eds.) (2022) Learning with Light and Shadows: Educational Lantern and Film Projection, 1860–1990. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers.

Wasielewski, A. (2024) ‘DALL-E in Flatland: Illusion, Space, and AI-Generated Images,’ Media Theory 8(1): 185–204.

Welford, W. D. & H. Sturmey (1888) The Indispensable Handbook to the Optical Lantern. London: Iliffe & Son.

Wildfeuer, J., J. Pflaeging, J. Bateman, O. Seizov & C. Tseng (eds.) (2019) Multimodality: Disciplinary Thoughts and the Challenge of Diversity. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.

Notes

[1] The study builds on materials collected from: 1) the Swedish National Library’s (Kungliga biblioteket) online newspaper database, 2) lantern slide collections in the archives of the Swedish Museum of Technology (Tekniska Museet) and the Swedish Film Institute (Svenska Filminstitutet), 3) the poster collections in the Swedish National Library and 4) lantern handbooks. Many of the lantern slides in these institutions are either accessible through the online platform DigitaltMuseum (KulturIt, Norway) or matched by slides in LUCERNA – The Magic Lantern Web Resource (Lucerna CIC/Exeter University). All English translations of Swedish titles and quotes in the body text are mine. References to these materials are given only in footnotes, except for lantern handbooks, which are accessible through library resources and listed in the bibliography.

[2] Quotes from uncaptioned adverts and paragraphs in: Dagens Nyheter, April 24, 1883; Aftonbladet, April 24, 1883; Helsingborgs Tidningen Skånes Allehanda, August 9, 1890; Arvika Allehanda, April 28, 1893; Arboga Tidning, January 28, 1898; Enköpings Posten, January 30, 1891; Dagens Nyheter, November 8, 1890; Smålands Allehanda, March 8, 1893; Wästgöta Posten, January 10, 1894; Westmanlands Allehanda, March 16, 1891; and handbooks: Marcy, 1877: iii–vi; Welford & Sturmey, 1888, 11.

[3] Advert in Strömstads Tidning, September 21, 1895.

[4] Friedrich Kittler’s history of optical media is an example of the former (2010: 70–117). But interestingly, André Gaudreault (2011) and other film scholars have shown how the “cinema of attraction” from around 1895 until the First World War, especially from the perspective of narrative integration, departs from the conventions of institutionalized cinema and also in other ways overlapped with the lantern lectures.

[5] [Frederik Thiele, 1887], Poster, Poster Collections (“Art”), Swedish National Library (see note 1).

[6] Uncaptioned press paragraphs and reviews in: Smålands Allehanda, March 8, 1889; Skånska Posten, December 24, 1892; Westmanlands Allehanda, November 14, 1894.

[7] Quotes from uncaptioned press paragraphs and reviews in: Norrköpings Tidningar, January 26, 1889; Sundsvalls Posten, November 21, 1887; Arvika Tidning, January 18, 1890.

Sonya Petersson is Associate Professor (Docent) of Art History and Research Fellow at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University. She has contributed to the edited volumes Digital Human Sciences (2021), the Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality (2023) and Knowing Visual Art (2025). She is currently working on the research project Pictorial Knowledge and Lantern Lectures in the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture (2024–27).

Email: sonya.petersson@arthistory.su.se

Conflicts of interest
None declared

Funding
The author acknowledges support from the Swedish Research Council (grant number 2023-00643) and the Åke Wiberg Foundation (grant number H23-0075).

Article history
Article submitted: 04/03/2025
Date of original decision: 21/04/2025
Revised article submitted: 29/04/2025
Article accepted: 29/04/2025