Frederick H. Evans's Lantern-Slide Lectures as a “Clock for Seeing”

Abstract

In Frederick H. Evans’s Lantern-Slide Lectures as a “Clock for Seeing,” Dervla MacManus presents an indepth examination of the British photographer Frederick Henry Evans’s Lincoln Cathedral lantern-slide lecture, which he delivered three times—in 1896, 1899, and 1902. Although better known for his platinotype photography, Evans also created series of lantern slides that represent prolonged encounters with buildings played out in sequences of images. Recalling Roland Barthes’s description of the photograph as a “temporal hallucination,” MacManus identifies and explores the spatial and temporal hallucinations evoked by Evans’s Lincoln Cathedral lecture. She argues that the temporal character of the lecture was a complex constellation driven by the built fabric of the cathedral itself, moving back and forth between past and present, and in turn giving rise to a spatial ordering of time. This analysis highlights the significant role played by optical technologies in Evans’s creation of a spatially and temporally idealized version of the cathedral. Further, it shows how Evans’s encounter with the building, mediated by the camera lens, encouraged a shift in photographic modes—from a spatial mode intended to re-create architectural experience to a scopic mode that scrutinized the cathedral’s richly carved surfaces.