From Magic Lantern Slide to Digital Image: Visual Communities and American Culture

Contemporary American culture is intensely visual. We transact with our visual culture in complex, participatory, sometimes disorienting ways; our boundaries of identity, place, time, and subjectivity seem to be constantly shifting. We drift variously between the sensations of observation and of surveillance, both pleasurable and uncomfortable, and between consuming and being visually consumed. Our interface with visual culture occurs in both real and virtual spaces, in which there are a variety of visual speakers and viewers, "multiple viewpoints" (Mirzoeff 18), multiple channels and directions for transmitting meaning, and multiple levels of access to production and consumption as well as manners of transacting. A digital photograph posted online was unimaginable to the average person in 1990; today the average teenager cannot seem to survive without a personal posting. In 1990, a photograph was an image produced in a camera, chemically reproduced, and printed on paper; today anyone with a cell phone can be a media photographer and see his or her work on the six o'clock news. The digital photograph is a specter or a ghost of the chemical photograph: it is saved in computer code, it is infinitely mutable, infinitely producible (as opposed to reproducible), and it is mediated through the computer or television screen. It does not seem to be quite real because it is not solid, but neither is it inert. It is semiotically active and unfixed. Like an actual ghost it is a powerful and affecting force that can change the spaces and people whom it haunts. In 1802, the Phantasmagoria opened in London as a ghostly show of magic lantern slides with spectral figures projected onto diaphanous screens that swooped and howled around a darkened room as a narrator told a tall tale of horror to a supposedly terrified audience. The combined thrill of magic, fantasy, and terror made the Phantasmagoria, its spin-offs, and the magic lantern slide technology of painted and photographed images on glass slides among the most popular public visual spectacles of the nineteenth century. By the late-nineteenth century magic lantern slides had two major markets: they were sold in large collections for public entertainments or for educational (or therapeutic) lectures, and they were sold in small collections for viewing in the home. The viewer was led to believe that the image on the magic lantern slide, when used educationally, was indexical: it bore a direct, unfiltered relationship to the real or original object. It functioned as a transparent slide-literally and metaphorically-and it was intended to be read as a visual surrogate for the "real" thing. Lecturers even called these slides "transparencies." When used to entertain, the slide was presented with a fictional image: frequently it was altered, manipulated, or even openly falsified. These images told moral, romantic, and sad stories; they presented visual deceptions such as giant fleas beside tiny men or they "revealed" ghostly apparitions. They were manipulated in both content and meaning, and were thus opaque on two levels: literally (manipulated) and metaphorically (fictional). The digital image appears in both transparent and opaque forms. Its comparison with the magic lantern slide is useful because a transparent digital image can masquerade as an opaque digital image and more dangerously, an opaque digital image can masquerade as a transparent image, confounding and inverting our sense of the indexical, the reliable, and even "reality." The digital image is infinitely malleable; it can be altered in form and content in ways that many of us cannot even imagine. Even the tyro snap-shooter of a digital camera knows how to eliminate red-eye, lighten or darken images, add or subtract color, make figures taller and thinner or shorter and stockier, cover skin blemishes, rearrange body parts, and add or delete backgrounds. Professional photographers use as many as thirty digital images to create a single fashion photograph. …