Features

In Living Color

By Steve Larese, Images courtesy Palace of the Governors's
In still-brilliant color and clarity, the Palace of the Governors' 100-year-old collection of glass-plate lantern slides illuminates how photography spread the Southwest's enduring mythos.
Long before Kodachrome brought slide shows into living rooms and movie houses, photography that could capture the true colors of life seemed impossible. The next best things were lantern slides, three-inch square glass plates that held a positive, black-and-white photograph that had been hand-tinted by an artist. When shown through a powerful lantern projector, the result was a large color image that looked as brilliant a century ago as it does today. And thanks to the use of lantern slides in promoting New Mexico from the late 1800s onward, Santa Fe still enjoys the benefits of international tourism to this day.

“Beyond entertainment value, these slides were educational,” says Daniel Kosharek, photo archivist at the Palace of the Governors, which, in coordination with this issue, will be offering more of the region’s lantern slides on the archive’s website beginning in February and March. These pages include plates selected from 12 collections from the museum’s photographic archives, donated over the years from various sources. “Many universities still have lantern-slide collections, some still in use because that’s the only record there is,” Kosharek says. “It’s amazing how vibrant and crystal clear these images are. They still hold their own today and just take your breath away.”

Most sets were commissioned by the railroad, promoting their stops in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Grants, and Gallup. Others include images by famed National Park Service anthropologist Jesse Nusbaum, and lesser-known photographers, such as Edwark Kemp, working for image houses out of San Francisco, Chicago, and Detroit. The collections were shown to audiences throughout the East, where even the simplest of scenes would be bewildering and awe-inspiring to those who had only ever known life in the big cities.

While the concept of using light to project painted-glass images dates back to the 17th century, the invention of photography popularized the ability to actually share scenes from around the world with an audience. In 1850, building upon the discoveries of French photographer Niépce de St. Victor, Philadelphia brothers and lensmen William and Frederick Langenheim patented the process for producing the hyalotype, a glass-plate positive image (hyalo being the Greek word for glass). By the 1870s, these hyalotypes were being shown in sciopticons—basically, crude slide projectors that used brilliant carbon-arc lights (later replaced with safer bulbs) and mirror optics to enlarge the slides, which were skillfully hand painted to be more realistic. While the Langenheims saw their invention primarily as a means of entertainment (charging a minimal fee to enjoy a presentation), the medium’s importance grew both as a vehicle for infotainment and an important method of forever preserving the life of the times. By the early 1900s, magic lanterns, as they came to be called, could be ordered, along with photo collections, from Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogs.

Given that everything else up to this time had been black-and-white, including motion pictures, the lure of seeing colored images of exotic locales was a huge thrill, especially given that the large-format slides could capture extreme detail. “To see these hand-tinted photos projected huge on a wall was a real experience for people,” says Kosharek.

That’s exactly the impact hotelier Fred Harvey and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway hoped to achieve. By showing people the landscapes and indigenous cultures of New Mexico and the Southwest, they wanted to entice people to buy a train ticket and see these scenes for themselves (and stay at Harvey’s hotels, including Santa Fe’s La Fonda, which would then bus tourists to the pueblos for a firsthand experience). The AT&SF hired photographers to document (and, yes, romanticize) this foreign land now open to the masses. In turn, Native Americans were hired to give talks on the trains and sell pottery and jewelry to entranced tourists at the railroad’s depots and hotels.

According to the American Magic-Lantern Theater group, by 1895, somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 showmen in the United States were giving about 175,000 lantern-slide presentations a year, often set to narration and music. The fees to attend were nominal, and the shows were known to attract crowds of more than 1,000 visitors each. Their popularity lasted until the 1930s and the advent of Kodachrome and cheaper 35-millimeter technology. Even today, these images provide an invaluable record of how we viewed ourselves 100 years ago and more. “We owe lantern slides a lot,” says New Mexico photographic-history expert Arthur Olivias, registrar at the Andrew Smith Gallery in Santa Fe and former photo archivist. “While they were primarily first used in anthropology and ethnology lectures, this interest sparked the tourist industry we still see today.”

For additional lantern slides, posted online in conjunction with this issue, see the Palace of the Governors’ photo archives at palaceofthegovernors.org.