B.3.1 Illuminating the science of art history: the advent of the slide lecture in France

Kim Timby, Independent Researcher

The voluminous art-historical slide collections that now encumber many an institution were once a sought-after new technology, the object of great efforts on the part of scholars and universities wishing to adopt the most modern methods. This talk will present new research on the origins of the art-historical slide lecture in France, in the 1890s. Via case studies at the École du Louvre and the Sorbonne, I will analyze why and how certain innovative professors integrated the projected image into their teaching, to what degree institutional slide collections or other resources buttressed this new teaching method, and the way students perceived this practice in the early years.

In particular, slides were crucial to building fact-based, scientific scholarship in the emerging discipline of Art History. Despite numerous practical and technical hurdles, they were desirable for making possible simultaneous, detailed viewing of photographs, on which complex visual demonstrations could be constructed. Study of the classes of one pioneering professor, the sculpture specialist Louis Courajod, reveals that he first delivered lectures and projections separately, then over several years progressively integrated the two until his classes were entirely structured around the continuous flow of luminous images – truly slide lectures. He avidly defended these images as elements of visual proof, essential to the “new methods” of a “new field of teaching.”

For students and an avid public of auditors, projected photographic reproductions thus served as proxies for original artworks, and were appreciated for the in-depth learning they allowed. Student response shows that the collective viewing of large, luminous images was also spectacular and very memorable. Slides therefore provided a powerful combination of science and entertainment, contributing to the popularity of art historical study beyond what photographs on paper or museum collections could provide.

B.3.2 The Culture of Early Colour: Unpacking the Royal Photographic Society’s colour slide collection

Hana Kaluznick, Assistant Curator: Victoria and Albert Museum

The Royal Photographic Society (RPS) collection is among the richest in the world, containing thousands of early slide materials that, due to institutional instability and art historical bias, have been greatly under-researched. In January 2019, I began researching the RPS’s early colour collection of photographs housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum, following its transfer in 2017. Studying this collection reveals its unrivaled ability to reflect the development of early colour photography between 1907 and 1935. This paper builds on that research, suggesting that the collection’s colour slides depict an interconnected culture of scientific and artistic progression that drove colour photographic practice from the autochrome in 1907 to Kodachrome in 1935.

Kodak’s release of Kodachrome provided the breakthrough technology that would be used to produce most twentieth century colour photographs. This marked the beginning of a new era in colour photography that was driven by manufacturers, essentially eliminating the craft developed by those working with colour slides such as, Thames plates, Paget, and Dufaycolor. Kodak’s new colour film products offered such an improvement in the rendition of naturalistic colour that it is often assumed that colour photography miraculously leaped from the autochrome to Kodachrome. This however, has left the intervening years between 1908 to 1935, a time of enormous experimentation and development by individual photographers and growing manufacturers, still largely unexplored. The Colour Group, founded in 1927 by amateur photographers Agnes Warburg, Violet Blaiklock, and many others, met to lecture, exhibit, publish, and champion the pictorial and scientific qualities of colour across its formats. By studying the circulation and production of their slide materials, we gain a deeper understanding of the culture of colour image making, the social life of these objects in an amateur setting, and new truths about the origins of popular colour photography.

B.3.3 From the Gestell to the Reprogestell: An Illustrated Technological Voice-Over

Eduardo Ralickas, Université du Québec à Montréal

This paper addresses the problem of narrative as it arises in the (now historicized) art history slide lecture. My talk will be an exercise in retrieval. But I won’t be asking the usual question: What kinds of things did art historians say with slides and slide projectors throughout the long twentieth century? I ask instead something quite different: What kinds of things do slide technologies say by means of art historians? My approach performs an ontological reversal in the present tense—from human agency to non-human technologies and their voices.

I focus specifically on a set of long forgotten copy apparatuses widely used to make transparencies for art-historical consumption, circa 1930 to the early 2000s. The ways in which these once prevalent technologies developed to frame and disseminate visual materials by means of light, I argue, helped foster the widespread illusion of epistemological transparency in the art history classroom. For slides are not only light-transmitting devices, as is customarily assumed; they are experienced first and foremost as light-inducing technologies. There’s more to that metaphor than meets the eye.

To put matters in the terms of Heidegger (whose 1949 reflections on technology continue to pervade thinking in the humanities, from Foucault to Jonathan Crary, including Donald Preziosi and Robert S. Nelson, two pioneers in the study of slide lectures), human beings are “claimed” by the technologies they are entangled in, and that “claiming” in turn shapes how humans are “called forth” into the “modes of revealing” that are available to them. Heidegger names this reciprocal process “positionality” (Gestell). A careful study of the copy stand—or Reprogestell—allows us to better understand this complex nexus between consciousness, presencing, and photography wherein artworks ultimately appear as self-luminous technological “images”—virtual entities that speak as if beyond history.

I seek to explore what Heidegger’s idea means for art history, a discipline that has now been fully “claimed” by the virtual image. Or has it?

B.3.4 The Image at Large: Getting the Measure of Deaccessioned Slides in metapictorial Art Practice

Annebella Pollen, University of Brighton

Over the last decade or so, former slide libraries serving art history departments in higher education institutions across Europe and North America have been undertaking collection management exercises on their 35mm pedagogical slides, now viewed as obsolete with the coming of commercial digital image collections and digital display mechanisms. Discussions about reducing or disposing of collections were prompted by a dramatic reduction in usage by the art historians whose needs the collections once served; vexed institutional questions about what to do with vast collections show the scale of the problem. After enormities have been accumulated but institutions and their users no longer want them, where should they go? The answer has been, in many cases, to artists.

This presentation explores what I describe as the metapictorial practice of artists who work with deaccessioned slide collections, from Philipp Goldbach, who used the 200,000 deaccessioned slides from the Cologne Institute of Art History to create radical new revisions of classification systems, to Canadian artists Susan Dobson and Annie MacDonell ,who each use unwanted slide collections to produce reflexive photography about photography and art about art history. I argue that these works provide valuable perspectives about the single image and its massed contexts that speak to contemporary anxieties about photographic scale. Art from slide collections moves from micro to macro view in a microscoping-telescoping oscillation, moving across piles, stacks, grids and multiple filing cabinets to single views of tiny details writ large. Drawing on theoretical ideas about the mise en abyme from Lucien Dällenbach, Craig Owens and W. J. T. Mitchell, I argue that artworks utilizing slide collections can illuminate the warp and weft of photographic meaning; the individual element in the mass becomes a pictorial device to understand the meaning of the whole.