These mysterious magic lantern slides arrived by chance when I purchased a magic lantern projector - an early type of slide projector. The images depict West Nigeria between 1900-1930 and include British missionaries who probably showed the slides in lectures. Missionaries projected images for religious education, to support the colonial project and illustrate Christian involvement in cocoa-growing and other industries.
With a background in documentary photography, I approached the slide collection as a site for critical enquiry. Before the aggression of colonialism and its imposed notions of science and religion, every tribe and region in Nigeria had distinct and complex animistic religious traditions and beliefs. In animism, all material phenomena have agency. Using experimental techniques, I set out to investigate the passive agency of the ‘magic’ slides.
Scratches, stains, and erasures are emphasised to destabilise the Western storytelling tropes and Enlightenment ideologies inherent in constructing the 'Other'. The photographic medium itself is revealed through its breakdown and decay, showing how the material creates illusions of reality. Colour introduces vitality to the black-and-white photographs, altering the aesthetics to undermine the documentary style's perceived discourses of science and truth. Racial taxonomies are changed through positive and negative inversion, transforming dynamic relations in visual storytelling. Similarly, by reworking the photograph of missionaries, divisions of civilised and 'primitive' are confounded. As the missionary discourse is eroded a new narrative emerges. Magic is restored to the slides to occupy a central place in culture as it did for centuries before being set apart by ideas of rationality, imperialism, and colonialism.
