Representations of the Extraordinary Human Body: Making Sense of the Nuttall Collection of Lantern Slides

Ine Van Dooren, Sarah Dellmann

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    Taking the slide collection of medical expert professor G.H.F. Nuttall as a starting point, this article investigates the representations of the extraordinary human body in West-Europe lantern history and lantern heritage between 1880 and 1930. To explain the at first sight unfamiliar image repertoire of this collection, the authors place the object, the medium and the aesthetical representations in a historical and cultural frame and compare the material on two levels. Firstly, the authors apply a cross-media visual analysis to describe several modes in which the extraordinary body is represented (cartes de visite, early cinema) and secondly, they trace the appearance of extraordinary bodies in other genres within the medium of lantern slides.
    After these two comparisons the authors provide a contextualized, more nuanced understanding of the archival ob- jects of the G.H.F. Nuttall slide collection and its visual strategies.
    Original languageEnglish
    Article number16
    Pages (from-to)61-79
    JournalFonseca, Journal of Communication
    Issue number16
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2018

    Keywords

    • magic lantern slides
    • early cinema
    • medical photography
    • collection-based research

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