Phantasmagoria-text

Phantasmagoria


Magic lantern slides belong to the long and mostly forgotten history of pre-cinema in the long effort to make images move.  The slides use my preferred vocabulary of fantastic imagination – projections of phantoms, death dances, mythical animals, and legends. As always, I use the most distressed and damaged slides. Photographed in a light destined to illuminate amoebas in water the dark field light darkens the transparent glass to reveal defects and structures invisible to the eye.