Category Archives: Pre-cinema optical devices

Dick Balzer 1944-2017

My apologies for not recognizing the death of Richard J. Balzer (1944-2017) earlier. He would have been more on top of it. His website remains: http://www.dickbalzer.com/. I recommend the Balzer “Life Map” http://balzerdesigns.typepad.com/balzer_designs/2017/12/richard-j-balzer-life-map.html created by his daughter.

I would say I’m lucky to have visited the collection but honestly, I don’t know anyone who was ever turned down. I accompanied classes from Boston area colleges, visiting photographers from China, Print Council of America, and The Magic Lantern Society several times, in addition to sending Princeton students individually. His door was always open and the megalethoscope loaded with a slide.

We all know Dick Balzer from his seminal volume Peepshows: a Visual History (Abrams, 1998) but by my count, he was involved in over 35 books. Those of us who only know his anamorphic slides, transformation prints, and peep eggs forget his day job. Harvard’s Kennedy School notes:

Richard J. Balzer has worked globally as an organizational consultant focused on leadership, strategy, and organizational change for over thirty years. He has served as a coach and advisor to chief executives and board chairmen. His clients have included British Petroleum, Standard Chartered Bank, Goldman Sachs, NBC, and the NBA. Balzer has also worked with a number of unions including the United Auto Workers, the United Steelworkers, the International Machinist Union, and the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers promoting joint labor-management efforts. A writer and photographer, he is the author of five books including Clockwork: Life In and Outside An American Factory, Next Door Down the Road and Around the Corner, and China Day By Day. He currently serves as the chairman of the Petra Foundation, an independent organization that identifies and awards grants to community-based leaders who work to address human rights and social justice issues throughout the United States. He is a graduate of Cornell University and Yale Law School.

They forgot the privately printed: The Print Council of America annual meeting, Boston, May 2, 2015, exhibition at the Richard Balzer Collection (2015). I’d post it but it is only for those members who made the trip, as per Balzer’s specification.

I’m sorry to have missed the service at the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, would have made the trip. Bryan Marquard of the Boston Globe has an obituary, “Dick Balzer, 73; expressed curiosity, passion in pursuits” from January 10, 2018: http://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/article_popover.aspx?guid=bd94fa67-2ef0-4089-83a3-c6308d86e988. Larry Rakow wrote a terrific remembrance in the current newsletter for the Magic Lantern Society of USA. Here’s small screen shot but you should join the organization if you like reading it.

The Newsboy’s Debt and other Lantern Readings

The Lucerna Magic Lantern Website notes: No magic lantern show consisted of slides alone: there were always elements like music, audience participation, or the spoken word. Especially in the later nineteenth century, many slide producers published ‘readings’ giving a recitation, story, or lecture to accompany the slide images.

The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired a dozen or so Lantern Readings, the text that accompanies a particular set of slide. As noted on the covers, the scripts could be borrowed for a performance and returned when it was done. Today, they can be matched with the Magic Lantern Society’s Readings Library project, launched in 1995, which currently offers nearly 3,000 images, scripts, and music scores.

 

The Newsboy’s Debt: [originally published by Hannah R. Hudson, “The Newsboy’s Debt,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, May 1873].  Plot: A gentleman trusts a newspaper boy to get change, which he was to bring to his office. The lad, however, is run over, but sends his brother to say that when he gets well he’ll work to refund the money lost at the time of the accident.

References to this set:
1891 Catalogue of photographic lantern transparencies and apparatus: season 1891-2 (Bradford: Riley Brothers, 1891), 34
1891 Complete catalogue of lantern slides, dissolving views, magic lanterns etc. (London: UK Band of Hope Union, 1891), C 17
1894 Wood’s catalogue of slides, optical lanterns, and dissolving views apparatus: forty-eighth issue (London: E.G. Wood, 1894), 106
1905 Catalogue of optical lantern slides (Bradford: Riley Brothers, 1905), 16
1910 A detailed catalogue of photographic lantern slides, life models &c. (Holmfirth: Bamforth & Co., 1910), 13
1912 Lantern slide catalogue (Glasgow: J. Lizars, 1912), 45
1912 Wood’s catalogue of over 200,000 slides, optical lanterns etc.: 1912-13, sixty-seventh issue (London: E.G. Wood, 1912), 383
Other references (2)
1888 Stationer’s Hall copyright register, COPY 1/393/154-155 (27 July 1888)
1888 Walter D. Welford and Henry Sturmey (compilers), The ‘indispensable handbook’ to the optical lantern: a complete cyclopaedia on the subject of optical lanterns, slides, and accessory apparatus (London: Iliffe & Son, 1888), 299

 

 

While the Sabbath Bells Were Ringing:


While the Sabbath Bells Were Ringing By W. A. Eaton (1848-1915)

The sunshine fell on cottage-roofs and waving cornfields bright,
And all the world seemed lying still beneath the golden light.
The cattle stood beside the hedge, the sheep were in the fold,
The sunlight on the old church-tower lit up the fane of gold.

And from its nest in the long grass the lark was upward springing,
And softly on the evening air the Sabbath bells were ringing.
The organ-notes rang loud and deep, and sweetly sang the choir,
While through the colored window-panes the sunlight fell like fire.

And earnestly the minister lifted his voice in prayer;
The sunshine fell upon his face, and on his snow-white hair.
And then once more upon the air there came the sound of singing,
While softly, sweetly over all the Sabbath bells were ringing.

Within the street of a great town I saw a noisy throng;
And there were women wan and pale, and brawny men and strong.
And they were pressing round the door of a gin-shop warm and bright;
Within they drank and screamed for more — it was an awful sight.

And oh ! the din of babbling tongues, and loud, half -drunken singing,
While far above them, out of sight, the Sabbath bells were ringing.
And farther on I saw a crowd around two women stand;
And one of them, with eyes aflame and blood upon her hand,

Struck at the other like a fiend and felled her to the ground;
And no one tried to interpose of all who stood around.
She rose and glared upon her foe, like fiend from hell up-springing.
And this was in a Christian land, while the Sabbath bells were ringing.

 

The Quarryman’s Resolve by Joseph John Lane:

 

 

Welcome to Rethinking Pictorialism Symposium Visitors

In conjunction with this weekend’s symposium, “Rethinking “Pictorialism”: American Art and Photography from 1895 to 1925” sponsored by the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, visitors were also introduced to our growing collection of pre-cinema optical devices.

Thank you to those students and scholars who got up extra early to come over to our classroom display.

Organized by Anne McCauley, David Hunter McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art, the two-day conference is being held in conjunction with the exhibition, Clarence H. White and His World: The Art and Craft of Photography, 1895-1925, on display at the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ (October 7, 2017–January 7, 2018).

After Princeton, the show travels to the Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA (February 7, 2018–June 3, 2018); the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME (June 22, 2018–September 16, 2018); and the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (October 21, 2018–January 21, 2019).

For more information about the exhibition and catalogue, see:

http://artmuseum.princeton.edu/story/clarence-h-white-and-his-world-art-and-craft-photography-1895%E2%80%931925

A few more magic lantern slides

Leaver slide of two cats confronting each other. Their backs go up.

Slipping slide, pulling a tooth.

Slipping slides, only the eyes move.

Thanks to a generous donation from David S. Brooke, director emeritus of the Clark Art Institute, the Graphic Arts Collection and the Cotsen Children’s Library have acquired a new group of chiefly English, hand-painted magic lantern slides. Here are a few more examples from this wonderful collection.

Seven of a twenty-five-slide temperance set titled “The Last Shilling,” in which a husband is about to spend his last shilling on drink but remembers his poor wife and instead, returns home to give the shilling to her.
Various chromatrope slides.

Sunbonnet Sue and I Want My Man

Thanks to a generous donation from David S. Brooke, director emeritus of the Clark Art Institute, the Graphic Arts Collection has acquired a new group of magic lantern slides. Among them are an almost complete set of “Sunbonnet Sue,” presumably images to accompany the song of that title, music by Gus Edwards (1879-1945) and lyrics by Will D. Cobb (1876-1930), published in 1908 by Gus Edwards Music Publishing Company.

In addition, there is a set of beautifully colored slides from the firm of Scott and Van Altena (SVA) of New York City, with the title “I Want My Man.” Scott and Van Altena are discussed at length in a recent article entitled “Outstanding Colorists of American Magic Lantern Slides,” by Terry Borton (American Magic-Lantern Theater. P.O. Box 44 East Haddam CT) in a recent Magic Lantern Gazette. He notes:

“One other company needs to be mentioned for out-standing color, both of detail, and of overall flamboyant impact. Scott and Van Altena (SVA) was the leading producer of the “illustrated song” slides that became popular about 1900, so popular that a minimum order became 20 sets and an order of 200 sets was not uncommon. The sets were usually of 12 to 14 images, selling for $5.00 (about $132.00 today).

The slides combine life models, elaborate photographic montages, and vibrant color—all depicting the lyrics of popular songs sung in movie theaters, and all perfectly matching the spirit of a new century. “Novelty” montages were created by combining negatives in a process that SVA guarded closely. The coloring was done in two rooms of the company’s New York studio, using aniline paints applied by camel-hair brushes.

John D. Scott and Edward Van Altena, the principals of the company, had somewhat different roles. Van Altena, whose mother had been an artist, became a photographer, and was the company’s master in that field. Scott was the master colorist—though Van Altena was responsible for coloring half the sets. Scott, who was deaf, had gone to the Lexington School for the Deaf, where he was taught by Dwight Elmendorf, whose comments about coloring were presented earlier, and who will reappear as an out-standing colorist later in this article.”

https://library.sdsu.edu/pdf/scua/ML_Gazette/MLGvol26no01.pdf

 

 

You can listen to a recording of the song online or play it through YouTube, links to both below.

http://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Crecorded_cd%7C555633

 

Print to Motion

Students in the class “Print to Motion” from Columbia University’s LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies visited recently along with instructor Ben Hagari and the Center’s artistic director Tomas Vu-Daniel. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arts/neiman/about.html They are printing their own thaumatropes, zoetropes, and other optical devices and so, came down to be inspired by our historical collection. http://rbsc.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/Optical%20Devices.pdf


Their timing was good, arriving just in time to see our newly acquired biunial magic lantern, a recent donation from David S. Brooke, director emeritus of the Clark Art Institute.

This very special lantern has a mahogany body with aluminum slide holders and has been wired for electricity making it possible to project slides for our students. As the name indicates, a biunial has two separate projection systems placed one over the other, which allows the lanternist to superimpose two images for dissolving views or other special effects. Ours was made by the Optimus company and is a nice companion to our single lens Perken Optimus Magic Lantern, ca. 1875.

The LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies was founded by a generous endowment from LeRoy and Janet Neiman in 1996 to promote printmaking through education, production and exhibition of prints. The center provides students, as well as established artists, a rich environment to investigate and produce images through a myriad of printmaking techniques which include intaglio, lithography, silkscreen, relief, photography, and digital imaging.

To see other items in our collection, choose the category ‘pre-cinema optical devices’ in the right margin.

Professor Huhtamo’s Cabinet of Media Archaeology


“Professor Huhtamo’s Cabinet of Media Archaeology” is a series about little known but influential media machines. It was recently posted for media education at any level and for anyone interested in media archaeology and the early history of the moving image.

Erkki Huhtamo is a Professor at the departments of Design & Media Arts, and Film, Television, and Digital Media at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). All devices are from his personal collection. New episodes will be added twice a year. They are produced as educational collaborations with undergraduate students at the Department of Design & Media Arts, School of Arts and Architecture, UCLA.

If you are on the west coast, Erkki Huhtamo will give a lecture at the Free Radicals: Evolving Perspectives on the Convergence of Art & Science symposium, July 8-9, 2017, at the ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena. The symposium will be held at the LA Times Auditorium, 1700 Lida Street. The event is organized by the Pasadena Arts Council with the Williamson Gallery at ArtCenter College of Design. Admission is free for Prof. Huhtamo’s lecture July 8 at 11:00 a.m.

For more information, read The Magic Lantern (newsletter of the Magic Lantern Society of Great Britain) (Ripon, North Yorkshire, England: Magic Lantern Society of Great Britain), Firestone Library (F) Oversize TR505 .M338q. Back issues: Graphic Arts Collection Q-000070

Automatons and Anamorphics


Nicolas and Alexis Kugel are the fifth generation of a family of antiques dealers founded in Russia at the end of the 18th century by their great-great-grandfather Elie Kugel, a collector of clocks and watches. In 1985, the Kugels took over the family business and in 2004, relocated the gallery to Hôtel Collot, 25 quai Anatole France, built in 1840 by Louis Visconti for Jean-Pierre Collot, director of La Monnaie (the French Mint).

Galerie J. Kugel is unique in its specialties and the eclecticism of the works of art it offers, including silver, sculpture, Kunstkammer objects, automatons, scientific instruments, and much more.

While visiting Galerie J. Kugel, we had the pleasure of viewing some of the unique treasures featured in Alexis Kugel’s most recent catalogue A Mechanical Bestiary: Automaton Clocks of the Renaissance, 1580-1640 (Marquand (SA) Oversize NK7495.G4 K8413 2016q).

Some pieces came from the Kugel family collection, which Mr. Kugel recalls playing with as a child: “I probably broke one or two, forcing the needle so it would animate,” he told Jake Cigainerosept of the New York Times.

Cigainerosept notes that the technology for automaton clocks dates to Heron of Alexandria, the ancient Greek mathematician who wrote extensively about mechanics. Their popularity surged during the Renaissance, when many were made in Augsburg, Germany, the artistic center of Bavaria at the time.

There is a pug dog whose eyes spin and tail wags; a monkey that beats his drum; and an elephant with dancing soldiers. “If you couldn’t afford a real elephant or lion for your menagerie,” noted Mr. Kugel, “then you could compromise with one of these.”


In another remarkable room are 18th-century anamorphic panel paintings, meant to be viewed in the reflection of a mirrored cylinder. We have several anamorphic prints in Princeton’s graphic arts collection, although not as rare or historic. https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/2015/03/25/anamorphic-images/

 

 

 

Optical devices on view

Our new reading room includes a consultation room at one end for small classes and group discussions. The room also has a case now filled with a portion of the optical devices collection. On view are a portable camera obscura, camera lucida, stereoviewers, megalethoscope, zograscope, zoetrope, thaumatropes, magic lanterns, and much more.

You are welcome to come individually or with a group to see these objects Monday-Friday between 9:00-4:45. At some future date, the back wall will be removed and students will be able to view the collection whenever the building is open, seven days/week.

For more information on the individual items, see the category list to the right and select ‘Pre-cinema optical devices.’

 

Sequential Magic Lantern Slides

On a recent visit from Fia Backström’s class VIS 311 The Photographic Apparatus, one of the things we looked at were sequential magic lantern slides. Here are a few examples together with our French magic lantern.

 

Soldiers going off to war / Soldiers returning from the war

Playing a joke on grandfather.

Prof. Backström’s class is described: “Since its inception, the technical development of photography has arisen out of specific historical and political circumstances that have “naturalized” its practice and ideologically coded its apparatus. Through critical discussions, material examinations, and studio projects, this seminar will take a reflexive approach to photographic technology past, present, and future. What can earlier periods of photography reveal about our current condition? How do lens-based technologies relate to determinations of race, class, and gender? What does it mean to be a photographer, to take photographs, and to agree or disagree with its apparatus?”

Disappearing apples below.