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A friend alerted us to the beauty of Johanna Inman’s Lantern Slide Photographs a few months ago and we’ve been thinking about them ever since. Inman, who is an adjunct professor of art at Arcadia University, takes photographs of the old-fashioned lantern slides that our parents and grandparents saw in their art history classes decades ago. The slides themselves are now cracked and worn and the images on them are slowly fading away.

We were intrigued especially by the images that depict ancient Roman monuments like the Forum (above) and the Colosseum (below), for the breakdown of the images on the slides seems to have accelerated the real decay that such monuments inevitably suffer as a result of the passage of time and of adverse environmental conditions. In this way, it’s almost as if Inman’s images of antique slides are a projection into the future.

We felt sure that readers of Eternally Cool would enjoy seeing these images and hearing a bit about Johanna Inman and about the “past forward” images she’s created, so we were especially pleased when she agreed to grant us an interview.

Would you begin by telling us where you grew up and where you live now?
I grew up in Abington, PA and I now live in the Fishtown neighborhood in Philadelphia.

The extensive body of work shown on your website suggests that you’ve
been working as a photographer for quite a while. How and when did you
start to take photographs?
I actually have been taking photographs since high school. A friend and I found a book of photography by Cindy Sherman and fell in love. We spent most of our junior and senior year dressing up in clothes from thrift stores and photographing each other.

So you went on to pursue a career in photography as a result of that inspiration?
Although I really loved photography from early on, in college I majored in Art History and Painting. After graduation from college I found myself still in the darkroom printing photographs and nowhere near an easel. I decided about a year after college to go back to graduate school for photography.

What kinds of subjects interest you most when you’re photographing?
I tell my students all the time that it’s not the subject but how you take the photograph. Even the most mundane scene or commonplace object can be made interesting by the way you choose to photograph it. That being said, most of my photographs are narrative. Subjects typically appeal to me because I want to tell their story or convey ideas about them to others.

Can you give us a bit of explanation of the images we’ve posted here on Eternally Cool? They’re really images of images, right?
Yes. These are photographs that I have made of antique objects called Lantern slides. Lantern slides were invented in the late 19th century and were widely used as visual aids to guide group lectures and to assist storytelling. The Lantern slide is 4 x 3-1/4” and is a transparent photograph placed between glass. Many of these were then hand colored, cataloged and filed in sets by subject matter. By the 1960s most Lantern slides were replaced by 35mm transparency film or chromes. The particular slides in this series were used in art history instruction and museum documentation. My photographs are made by placing the Lantern slide on a flat bed scanner and scanning it as a positive image. This allows me to record all aspects of the image and its surface. I then use photoshop to adjust contrast and highlight important aspects of the piece. The cast shadow is naturally created in the scanning process.

What compelled you to make a photograph study of the lantern slides?
My interest in the Lantern slide started around 2004 when I began working as a curator in a Slide Library. At that time a friend of mine working in a museum archive had given me several boxes of these outdated and damaged Lantern slides that were being discarded. Originally I thought they were beautiful in their decomposing state and was saddened that the institution that owned them was now throwing them away. After a while of looking at them and thinking about them, I felt that it was important to document them and highlight the beauty of their transitory state.

What kind of challenges did you meet in making images of images?
At first I felt uncomfortable in this role, essentially making photographs of someone else’s photographs. However, as I continued to work with these objects I realized that making a photograph of a Lantern slide is really the same as making a portrait or taking a photograph of a building. My photographs are not just records of this Lantern slide but images that portray how time has played a large role in the destruction of the original slide and how others had come along in its history and painted on them, cataloged them and numbered them. My images are not only photographs of the actual slide, but of the life and history of this slide and its current state.

The images seem to be a study in the transitory nature of the traditional photographic process. Were you thinking of that when you decided to make these fading, ruined slides your subject?
Yes. As I mentioned I had just become the Slide Curator if a 35mm Slide Library. In this role I was directing this library’s move toward digital images. I felt compelled to record these historic images but also this antiquated medium within photography. Meanwhile these objects are also documents of the historical places that they capture at a very specific moment in time. I think that the damage to the slides highlights the parallel between the now obsolete medium of the Lantern slide and the fading and eroding landscape which it captures.

It seems that the lantern slide photos challenge viewers to see what isn’t there. Because the slides are faded and decaying, viewers have to struggle to make out the monuments and places depicted, so that the photos work in a way that’s antithetical from the original purpose of the slide which was to provide a clear image of monuments and places so that they could be studied by art history students. Any thoughts about that?
This is my favorite element of the project. Though the images are faded, cracked, and even completely disintegrated in some cases, a fingerprint of the original photograph remains along with a new form and manifestation. In the case of Harbor, Palermo, the original photographic harbor has dissolved into swirls of repositioned silver creating a new abstract painting still symbolic of the water in an ancient harbor. In Verrochio’s Colleoni, the glass has cracked to behead Colleoni and his horse, again referencing the decay of this historical sculpture.

I see this process of decay as evolution more than erosion. These photographs capture the layers within these historic objects highlighting both the original work of art along with its conversion into a teaching tool and cataloged document. This photographic image that I create also transforms these objects one step further into a new photographic form with its own set of aesthetic and artistic processes and values to be considered.

Johanna Inman recently showed her work in solo exhibitions at the Tyler School of Art, at Philly’s 201 Gallery, and at the Ann Reid Gallery in Princeton, and her work can be purchased at Art Star.

Enjoyed this interview? Then you’ll want to read other articles about visual artists Pattie Cronin, John Kelly, and Jersey Walz on Eternally Cool.