The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [39]
Thus the first slide projectors came to be known as lanternes de peur—“lanterns of fear.”
I don’t look at our honeymoon slides anymore, but I’m pretty sure we took shots of the usual tourist scenes: my wife waving in front of pastel, gingerbread Curaçao harbor facades; my wife navigating a bamboo raft down the Martha Brae River; my wife at a St. Maarten beach bar, mugging with her new ruby necklace; my wife aboard ship, leaning on the railing, back-dropped by sea and sky, her eyes wide and young and happy—the loveliest blues I had ever seen. I took a lot of pictures of my new wife—I don’t recall having taken any without her in them. But I don’t much remember specific shots—except the one with her at the ship’s railing. She’s standing there in her shorts and halter top, the most beautiful woman I ever knew, affecting a saucy smile, pointing with her seashell-braceleted wrist to a sign stenciled on the gunwale: DANGER.
That’s the only one I’m really sure about. It was a long time ago.
The history of slides is, essentially, the attempt to make illusion seem more real than reality. In 1833 David Brewster invented the stereoscope, an optical device that, when viewed through lenses, made special photographs seem three-dimensional. By “projecting” an image onto the retina with the appearance of depth and texture, the device caused not only its makers but its enthusiasts to claim it provided the “perfect image of reality.” Later, Daguerre’s huge paintings, his dioramas, cast on transparent materials and presented in darkened theaters and illuminated from behind, imbued his landscapes with breathtaking realism. Manipulation of the light behind the pictures gave the effect of actual changing light and shade or even of complete transformation from daylight to night, and thus an intense illusion of reality. There is a famous story of a spellbound child observing one of Daguerre’s dioramas and declaring it “more beautiful than nature itself.”
At the time of our honeymoon, cruises were different than they are today. To eat a meal on board that did not involve foraging for peanuts between your mattress and headboard, you had to don a tie and jacket and enter the ship’s dining room at a specific time and sit with people you did not know. They herded you into this immense, frenetic hall that had all the characteristics of the Chicago slaughterhouse in Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, in which upside-down hogs are conveyed squealing with terror to an aproned guy who slices their throats with a rusty knife. I don’t know what women had to wear because, to be honest, I never looked at them. I had eyes only for my new wife.
We sat with a group of six other couples, middle-aged folks from Nebraska who had never seen a body of water in their lives, let alone an actual ocean, and who seemed pretty baffled by the concept. So there my wife and I were, shouting across the table at a bunch of devil-may-cares from the Heartland, trying to figure out how to get our food down without chewing and get back to our room to screw. Apparently our table mates were part of a group of TV-set salesmen (and their wives) who had won a sales contest that included all the free liquor they could spill on themselves in a week. They talked with their cheeks as florid and bulbous as Bavarian oompah-ers, and, while spitting veal cutlet and routinely knocking over highball glasses with the maniacal gusto of a Spike Jones routine, they barked sage marital advice to me and my new bride that included the phrase, “Never admit anything.” They were jolly and pickled, they ate off each other’s plates, and their wives showed us pictures of their kids and snorted, “Here’s our little shits.”
In 1870 a Venetian, Carlo Ponti, designed the megalethoscope, a beautifully milled tabletop cabinet—itself a work of art—in which photographs were