Welcome to The Magic Lantern Society

The Magic Lantern Society has a world-wide membership comprising collectors, enthusiasts, students of film, visual media and popular culture, magicians, artists, performers, scientists and archival organisations from over 30 different countries - all sharing the same enthusiasm for the magic lantern and its history.

The Society is not interested exclusively in the lantern, or in the past. Member interests are broad, covering other 'lost' forms of visual media and optical diversions, as well as their 21st century counterparts.

We have quarterly meetings with lively performances, lectures and a collector's market for members only, hold an international convention every four years in Great Britain and occasionally organise visits to major international exhibitions and archive collections. We publish a quarterly Newsletter outlining member activities and a Journal of recent research. We issue video tapes and DVD's of our meetings and members enjoy exclusive offers on the wide range of Society books, such as our prize-winning Encyclopedia of the Magic Lantern.

When you have explored the site further, visit the Membership page and discover how you can join us.

 

 

Must See Now.....

You've got a month to see the Robert Longden exhibition An Inland Voyage at the Herbert Gallery in Coventry, before it closes at the end of August. The exhibition, I mean.  I previewed it on Granny Buttons here, last month, and went to see it myself a few days later.
It's a display of about 3 dozen of the remaining photos of Robert Longden, who spent several years recording the lives of the old working boat people at Coventry and around Hawkesbury Junction. It's been put together by Stephen Pochin, great-grandson of Longden, and includes an assortment of old working boat accoutrements loaned from the Stoke Bruerne Canal Museum.  He's giving a talk about the exhibition on August 17th.

One of the most interesting of the accessory exhibits was examples of the 3.25" square lantern slides from which the images are printed, and examples of the equipment used to display them in talks he gave at his local photographic society.  The photos are really lovely quality, and it's amazing to think that the pictures - some of them almost poster-sized - were taken from these glass slides.