The main part of the holiday rush is over, including the flurry of holiday movie openings, but as children remain on winter vacation, families still may be seeking a fun-for-everyone outing.
For anyone fitting that description, as well as for photography or history buffs in general, Saturday’s “Magic Lanterns and the Birth of Photography” event at Seattle’s Burke Museum is designed to fit the “fun for everyone” bill.
Before the sleek, often digitally enhanced movies we enjoy today, black-and-white and silent films ruled the big screens. And before those, came the precursor to movies in general, known as “Magic Lantern shows,” or, in other words, the first slide shows.
Throughout the “Magic Lanterns” event, visitors will be able to watch 20-to-30-minute-long presentations, which include antique, hand-painted slides. The varied topics include the Civil War, the work of Wilson A. Bentley, “The Snowflake Man” who photographed 5,000 snow crystals in his lifetime, and a lecture on “The Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen.”
The photography theme coincides with the museum’s latest exhibit, “Vanished Kingdoms: The Wulsin Photographs of Tibet, China and Mongolia, 1921-1925,” and explains how the lantern slide technology works.
The Vanished Kingdom exhibit “shows how the Magic Lantern slide technology was used to document the scientific expedition, before cameras were commonly used,” museum spokeswoman MaryAnn Barron said.
She went on to say that the Burke books exhibits every three months, and the Magic Lanterns event was chosen because its content has to do with Tibet.
To that end, Barron explained, the slides currently in the museum were carried from Tibet to China in the mid-1920s by Frederick and Janet Wulsin, a young American couple who explored far reaches of China. These slides were hand-painted with sable brushes, through painstaking work by just a handful of artists, often in conditions of darkness, she said. The Wulsins then sent the slides to the United States and donated them to Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
“It was kind of a pleasant surprise as we went along, that we found out about all the rich history of the slides, and we thought the public might want to learn about it, too,” she said.
Although Saturday’s event doesn’t offer anything literally “hands-on,” the slide shows certainly will engage audiences. In addition, the museum’s walls and display areas will offer a visual feast of fine art prints, painted illustrations, vintage posters and other photographic works.
Furthermore, Magic Lantern Society of Seattle members will be on hand to give visitors advice on transferring their own old photographs to digital format.
LEFT: A merchant’s family and young brides photo by Frederick and Janet Wulsin from the Burke Museum’s “Vanished Kingdom” exhibit.
bBELOW: Other examples of slides from the “Magic Lantern” event Saturday at the Burke Museum.
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