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

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 objects of the G.H.F. Nuttall slide collection and its visual strategies.