AMNH Lantern Slides at the Margaret Mead Festival

Before streaming video, before the video cassette, even before the venerable filmstrip, teachers relied on the visual aid. And for several generations of New York City teachers, the American Museum of Natural History came to the rescue with lantern slides, hand-colored, glass-printed photographs projected one luminous image at a time. The museum manned a whole fleet of delivery vans that raced around town, bringing boxes of slides --- as well as taxidermy specimens and dioramas --- to educators and their charges.

The subjects of the slides were as esoteric as the museum itself: "Life in a Congo Village," "Useful Trees," "Minor Industries of New England," and, what surely must have been one of the more popular boxes, "The Lion, Tiger, and Elephant at Home." By the second half of the twentieth century, however, this motley and vast (140,000 slides at its peak) collection of images gave way to newer, more efficient formats. The museum decided to junk most of its collection, but employee Carlton Biel --- that's him loading up the delivery van in the photo above --- couldn't bear to see them tossed out, so he brought home to Staten Island, where they sat for decades until his family called up museum archivist Barbara Mathé and asked if she'd like them back.

Last weekend, the museum showed a selection of the slides as part of the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival. Mathé, along with scholars Allison Griffiths and Constance Clark, spoke about lantern slides, giving an overview of their place in cultural history and the various uses to which they've been put. The talks were interesting, but, as all three speakers noted, they could hardly compete with the slides themselves. Some are gorgeous, others garish; some are subtle and realistic, others exaggerated and outlandish. All are utterly absorbing.

Photos: The first, sixth, and seventh photos are courtesy of the AMNH Flickr set of lantern slide images. The second and third photos are from the AMNH's marvelous online exhibit "Picturing the Museum."

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