Transparencies

For industrial and educational purposes transparencies of all kinds are valuable, and we shalltouch upon them elsewhere. With lantern slides our art-student has nothing to do. A lantern picture is an optical illusion, and lantern slides are toys when they do not serve lecture purposes. For lecture purposes they are of course invaluable, but they have no place in art, neither have stereoscopic slides. They all rank with the camera obscura, the diorama, and the panorama.

Lantern Slides

We say all this because a beginner must be cautioned against paying any serious attention to these subjects if his aim be to become an artist. Art is much too serious for her devotees to trifle with any other subject, and besides the making of lantern and stereoscopic slides is apt to have a bad effect on the beginner. His attention becomes centered on the production of pretty things - a neat, small, superficial prettiness pervading most of the work of goodlantern-slide workers. Conventional compositions and Birket-Foster prettiness are the lantern-slide maker's beau-ideals. Of course these qualities are very admirable for lantern slides, for without them they would have but little attraction; but they are quite distinct from, and very, very far removed from, having any connection with fine art.

Stereoscopic Slides

We know many artists who photograph and value photography per se, but we have yet to meet that one who deigns to make lantern slides except for the purpose of making enlargements from which to draw. It has been said that the appearance of stereoscopic pictures is wonderfully true; this is not the case. There is a lustre, false tonality, and apparent illusion, which to an artist makes them anything but true. In short, until photographers do away with much of the "play" of their art, and look at it seriously, they cannot hope that highly-trained artists will join in with them.

Lecture Purposes

For scientific lectures of course lantern slides are invaluable, as we have already said, and for this purpose they should be untouched; but we cannot help smiling when we hear of producers of slides claiming for their work the title of "artistic," because they are untouched and true. Absolute truth is not necessarily art, as we have often pointed out, and as Muybridge's photographs prove.

Let our student, then, avoid these snares, unless he wishes to cultivate what Professor Herkomer has aptly called "Handkerchief-box art."