Introduction
At the end of November 1922, Dr Bulteel, chairman of the Willemsfonds – a Flemish socio-cultural society – delivered a talk in Zelzate, a small town near Ghent on the Belgian–Dutch border, for which he used a so-called ‘magic lantern’ – a common visual projection device at the turn of the twentieth century. A local journalist reported that Dr Bulteel guided the audience on a quasi-virtual tour ‘through the provinces of Liège, Luxembourg, and Namur’, projecting ‘beautiful slides’ that showcased ‘the peculiarities of the cities of Liège, Verviers, Spa, Bouillon, Dinant, Namur, as well as many other villages on the banks of the Vesdre, the Ourthe, the Semois, the Lesse with its cave of Han, and the Meuse’.Footnote 1 By displaying multiple slides in rapid succession, illustrated travel lectures like these created the illusion of going on a journey without physically moving, offering spectators an immersive visual experience.Footnote 2 This effect was explicitly noted in another report on an illustrated lantern lecture, which stated: ‘thanks to some two hundred slides, we may now claim to have experienced the journey’.Footnote 3
Tourism promotion served as both a format and a motivating force for the illustrated lecture of Dr Bulteel. However, this article will show that the magic lantern was mobilized for a broader range of place-promotional strategies than tourism alone in Belgium in the decades around 1900, highlighting the qualities of Belgian cities and towns for a diversity of political, social, economic and cultural reasons. We will analyse how the projection of photographic slides before an audience became an influential tool within an emerging knowledge and entertainment-based lecture circuit, where Belgian cities and other locations emerged as particularly prominent subjects of discussion. The widespread adoption of the visual technology of the magic lantern, thus, played a crucial, albeit hitherto underappreciated role in shaping how Belgian places were presented, talked about and experienced at the start of the twentieth century.Footnote 4
Thanks to the combined efforts of media archaeologists, historians of visual culture and scholars in science communication, education, performance and entertainment studies, the once-neglected practice of illustrated lantern lecturing has gained increasing international scholarly recognition.Footnote 5 Long mischaracterized as a mere precursor to cinema – assumed to have faded into obsolescence with the advent of moving pictures in the early 1890s – the magic lantern has, through the development of a dedicated field of ‘lantern studies’, been recently re-established as a key medium of mass communication at the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote 6
Scholars such as Richard Crangle and Ludwig Vogl-Bienek have emphasized that public lantern performances became integral to the modernizing associational life of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe and beyond.Footnote 7 With the advent of improved projection technologies – first utilizing bright gaslight and later electric illumination – lantern lectures could project sharp, luminous images onto large screens or even bare walls, effectively transforming public lectures into immersive visual experiences. The screen, and by extension the lantern, became central to new forms of social engagement mediated through visual culture, with the term ‘magic’ gradually falling away as the lantern assumed a more scientific and utilitarian identity.Footnote 8 Martin Loiperdinger has described this projection technology as ‘the basis of a pronounced media culture’, marked by standardized equipment, reliable illumination sources, a diverse and widely distributed repertoire of slides and frequent public exhibitions.Footnote 9 By the early twentieth century, the lantern was reappropriated in a cultural climate increasingly attuned to visuality as a direct, empirical mode of understanding, and to education as a crucial driver of societal progress and emancipation. Positioned at the crossroads of expanding urban entertainment and emerging educational initiatives, the illustrated lantern lecture became a staple of bourgeois civic life – integrated into the broader landscape of the performing arts, public education, scientific communication, socio-cultural training and notably, the visual promotion of place and identity.Footnote 10
Belgium was not an exception. While the French-speaking circuit emerged earlier, the Dutch-speaking network expanded significantly around 1900. Previously, visual aids, such as anatomical models and drawings, were sometimes used to support the speaker. Over time, the projection lantern became a core feature of the lecture circuit and remained dominant in public lecturing well into the inter-war period.Footnote 11 Despite the growing popularity of moving images, the lantern continued to play an important role in promotional strategies until the 1950s.Footnote 12 This can be explained by the clear advantages of the medium, such as the speaker’s ability to retain control over the timing and intent of the lecture.Footnote 13
Recent scholarship has increasingly examined the role and influence of the projection lantern in political discourse, social reform, poor relief, education and science within urban contexts.Footnote 14 Despite the lantern’s widespread use as a popular optical medium for education, information dissemination and entertainment in civil society, its function in urban promotion – particularly in relation to national and regional contexts – has received comparatively little attention.Footnote 15 While considerable research has explored how places have been represented and promoted, notably within tourism studies, the specific use of the lantern in these efforts remains underinvestigated.Footnote 16 The emergence of illustrated travel lectures was closely tied to the advent of photography, a technology swiftly adopted by the burgeoning global tourism industry.Footnote 17 Contemporary observers lauded the projection lantern for its realism and sensory immediacy, which enabled audiences around the turn of the twentieth century to become ‘armchair travellers’, virtually exploring distant locales.Footnote 18 To date, lantern scholarship has predominantly focused on depictions of faraway, ‘unknown’ or ‘exotic’ regions – such as the Polar areas or Africa – and on how these visual narratives facilitated the dissemination of ideas related to cosmopolitanism, nationalism, colonialism and imperialism.Footnote 19 However, this emphasis has led to a relative neglect of representations of more proximate, familiar places.
Investigating how local places were visualized and discussed within the emerging lantern lecturing circuit in Belgium presents a particularly fruitful avenue for future comparative research. Eric Storm has previously identified a regionalist revival in early twentieth-century Europe, using regionalism as a neutral term to denote movements aimed at studying, constructing and reinforcing regional and local identities.Footnote 20 In parallel, Tom Hulme has drawn attention to the rise of a ‘civic publicity movement’ in early twentieth-century England, driven by intensifying inter-urban competition to attract tourists and enhance local economic and social appeal – efforts closely linked to the cultivation of civic pride and urban identity.Footnote 21 These developments raise important questions about how similar processes panned out in Belgium, particularly regarding the role of visual promotional strategies in shaping regional and civic self-representation.
Belgium in the early twentieth century offers a compelling case for comparison with other early industrialized European nations. Celebrated for its picturesque riverine landscapes along the Scheldt and Meuse, and for its historic Flemish ‘art cities’ such as Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp, Belgium had long attracted European travellers.Footnote 22 At the same time, the country was undergoing rapid modernization as a consequence of early industrialization. By the turn of the century, significant investments in transportation infrastructure – especially in railways and roads – had rendered the country increasingly accessible and affordable to domestic and international visitors. From the 1880s onward, rising living standards and progressive social measures, such as the 1905 law on Sunday Rest, facilitated the democratization of leisure travel.Footnote 23
Amid these transformations, coalitions of local politicians, civic boosters and stakeholders from the hospitality and retail sectors began actively promoting their cities and regions. Their efforts were aimed both at attracting new visitors and at fostering a sense of local pride and civic consciousness. In doing so, they embraced innovative methods of visual and media-based promotion. Although national-level tourism promotion by the Belgian state did not materialize until the 1930s and 1940s, the country’s dynamic and diverse civil society effectively compensated for this absence, pioneering bottom-up strategies of place marketing and identity construction.Footnote 24
In the following article, we delve deeper into the actual visual content and the societal context of lantern slides as underacknowledged historical sources, asking questions about the portrayal and promotion of Belgian cities and towns in the first decades of the twentieth century. We start by establishing which views of Belgian cities were commonly promoted, and how these images aligned with other, better-known and more well-studied visual representations, such as Belgian urban photography. Whereas Belgian urban photography has received widespread national and international attention in the last three decades, lantern slides have only recently been discovered and discussed as important visual historical sources in their own right.Footnote 25
In the next section, we continue our visual analysis of Belgian locations as represented through lantern slides, with a particular focus on the frequency of represented places and the social and institutional contexts in which these images were shown. We aim to elucidate the emergence, motivations and logics of early strategies of place promotion in Belgium. Specifically, we examine the actors and organizations responsible for urban promotion and investigate their underlying motivations.
Our new empirical findings are grounded in the development of two original source databases, the construction and methodology of which are outlined below and further detailed in Appendixes 1 and 2. Based on this material, we argue that historical research into urban promotion during the first half of the twentieth century must engage more closely with the practice of illustrated lectures. This practice was not only widespread in Belgium – persisting longer than is often assumed – but also played a significant role in shaping and disseminating urban imagery. Lantern slides, in particular, warrant re-evaluation as a powerful visual medium that contributed meaningfully to the popularization and definition of key representations of the city. These images were instrumental in the promotion of tourism, the cultivation of civic pride and the construction of local, regional and national identities.Footnote 26
Re-sourcing illustrated lectures in Belgium: constructing a newspaper database and a photographic slide dataset
To assess the significance and structural features of illustrated lantern lecturing in early twentieth-century Belgium, we began by collecting advertisements and reviews published in the newspapers of two of the most important cities in Belgium, Antwerp and Brussels. Furthermore, newspapers from Antwerp and Brussels frequently included references to lantern performances held elsewhere in the country. One such example is Dr Bulteel’s illustrated lecture mentioned in the introduction, which demonstrates how coverage often extended beyond the immediate, most populated urban centres of Antwerp and Brussels. These broader references enhance the representativeness of our dataset for Belgium as a whole and allow for more substantiated claims regarding the nationwide scope of the Belgian lantern lecture infrastructure. It remains important, however, to acknowledge that newspapers are likely to reflect only a portion of the full lecture circuit in a nation – particularly those segments directed at a more literate and urban readership. Nevertheless, existing research suggests that when organizations chose to promote their lantern lectures via the press, they tended to do so with consistency.Footnote 27
Our newspaper selection encompassed two sample periods – 1902–04 and 1922–24 – and included newspapers in both French and Dutch, representing a range of ideological orientations (Catholic, liberal, socialist and neutral). Using a set of 26 keywords associated with the projection lantern, we systematically searched for references to illustrated lectures.Footnote 28 From these results, we identified for this article lectures that focused specifically on the discussion and visual presentation of Belgian places, cities, and towns (for detailed methodology, see Appendix 1).
This research yielded 2,127 unique references from a total of 4,688 (excluding duplicate mentions across newspapers) to illustrated lectures that had a spatial reference (45 per cent). Three levels of spatial references were identified: continent, country and city (see Table 1). If the announcement mentioned a place in one of the last two levels, we completed the parent levels. For instance, we filled in Europe and Belgium for lectures on Antwerp. We identified 350 lectures covering Belgium of which 134 (approximately 38 per cent) focused on specific cities and towns.Footnote 29 Within this subset, we observed considerable diversity in geographic focus, the motivations behind the lectures and the institutional backgrounds of the presenters and organizers. By systematically organizing this data into a structured database, we were able to trace temporal developments and conduct a comparative analysis of the ‘lantern-scape’ in Antwerp, Brussels and in Belgium more broadly, during the early decades of the twentieth century.
Table 1. Overview of the number of illustrated lectures in Antwerp and Brussels (1902–04 and 1922–24), broken down into different levels of geographical references
More specifically, we extracted key data from the newspaper sources, including the lecture date, the speaker’s name, the organizing institution and the venue. Where available, we also recorded information regarding the audience’s reception, descriptions of the slides shown and summaries of the accompanying commentary. This dataset provides a foundational empirical basis for analysing the role of lantern lectures in the visual and discursive promotion of place in Belgium during this period. The empirical foundation established here enables the contextual analysis of urban promotional practices, which is the central focus of the second section of this article.
In addition to analysing newspaper advertisements and reviews, we also identified and examined lantern slides depicting Belgian cities and urban spaces to gauge their visual content. For this article, our starting point was the Lucerna collection – an online archive comprising over 42,000 digitized slides, primarily representing visual material used in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British contexts. Given the transnational circulation of lantern slides, it is highly plausible that many of these images were also shown by lantern operators lecturing in Belgian cities and towns.Footnote 30
Unlike some of its neighbours, Belgium lacked large-scale domestic producers of lantern equipment or photographic slides. In the early stages, lecturers in Belgium relied on imports from British, French and later German photographic firms.Footnote 31 International catalogues indicate that complete sets of slides, often accompanied by pre-written lecture scripts – even those dedicated to specific countries such as Belgium – were readily available for purchase or rental.Footnote 32 However, by 1900, a growing number of local photographers and amateur photographic societies in Belgium were actively documenting rural and urban landscapes, thereby generating visual material that could be converted into lantern slides.Footnote 33
Simultaneously, the rise of the Belgian tourist industry led to the mass production of professional photographs and postcards, many of which were adapted for use in lantern projection. Some of this visual material even influenced early tourism cinema.Footnote 34 Prominent figures such as Charles Buls, the former mayor of Brussels, exemplified this trend by assembling personal collections of lantern slides, combining their own photographic work with professionally produced images acquired from commercial sources.Footnote 35
In addition to the British-focused material in Lucerna, the database also contains digitized slides from Belgian and Dutch archival collections.Footnote 36 Based on slide titles and identifiable locations, we selected 79 photographic slides specifically depicting Belgian urban settings. To enhance this dataset, we incorporated an additional 215 digitized slides sourced from the B-magic project (2018–23), an initiative aimed at uncovering the cultural impact of the magic lantern as a visual mass medium in Belgium between c. 1830 and 1940.Footnote 37 This resulted in a total corpus of 294 digitized lantern slides depicting Belgian urban places (see Appendix 2). These slides are likely to have played a role in urban promotional strategies in Belgium in the early twentieth century and serve as the empirical foundation for the visual analysis presented in the following section.
Projecting Belgian cities: delving into the visual content of illustrated lectures
What views of Belgium, and particularly its cities, were commonly promoted in the illustrated lecture circuit during the early decades of the twentieth century? What recurring visual themes can be identified? And in which narrative order did slides on Belgium’s urban places appear? Photographic lantern slides – much like postcards and other ephemeral visual promotional material such as posters and leaflets – tended to reproduce widely recognized or canonized images and visual scenarios. Both in terms of subject matter and visual composition, lantern slides adhered closely to conventional, almost formulaic characteristics and storylines derived from earlier pictorial traditions, including etchings, drawings, paintings, lithographs and book and magazine illustrations. This intermedial exchange, in which specific images seamlessly migrated across different visual media, was a defining feature of fin-de-siècle visual culture.Footnote 38 While the recycling of familiar imagery ensured recognizability, the adaptation of monochrome and even coloured photographs into glass lantern slides introduced an innovative layer of realism.Footnote 39
The Projektion für Alle series no. 49 on Belgium, a ready-made slide set produced in Germany, already provides tempting clues as to how lantern slides were mobilized in illustrated lectures on the country. Launched by German inventor and early filmmaker Max Skladanowsky between 1906 and 1928, the Projektion für Alle series comprised 96 sets, each containing 24 slides. These popular and broadly distributed sets covered a wide range of subjects – including geography, art and biblical themes – and were marketed to mass audiences, including lecturers active in Belgium.Footnote 40 Series no. 49 featured a visual tour through Belgium, which started with a map of the country (Figure 1), followed by primarily urban views of Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges, and other well-known Belgian places. It is easy to envision how such a geographical depiction of the country functioned as both an introductory and central reference point in popular lectures on Belgium, familiarizing audiences with the nation’s contours and the geographical positioning of the primarily urban locations discussed. The use of such maps was a common visual-discursive strategy in lantern lectures, as they provided an essential geographical framework at the outset, enhancing the audience’s spatial understanding of the subject matter.Footnote 41
Figure 1. Map of Belgium (Source: Projektion für Alle, 24 slides, 1910, Lucerna).
Next, audiences were most likely confronted with so-called topographical depictions of Belgian cities (Figure 2).Footnote 42 These images prioritize panoramic vistas that encompass the city as a whole. Elevated viewpoints play a crucial role in achieving this perspective, often captured from atop a cathedral or, frequently, from across a body of water to provide a more expansive view. Images of Belgian rivers, canals and coastal or riverine towns – such as Ostend and Dinant – figure prominently. The presence of water serves not only aesthetic and symbolic functions – reflecting its integral role in the historical identity of Belgian cities – but also facilitates the necessary spatial separation to construct a panoramic composition or distant perspective. It is plausible that such lantern slides were displayed at the start of promotional lectures, as a means of establishing a narrative structure that transitioned from an external panoramic view to an intimate exploration of the city’s interior, highlighting its key landmarks and monuments. This approach would have effectively mirrored the experience of an actual tourist excursion, a resemblance that attendants at lectures explicitly recognized, as noted in the introduction.
Figure 2. Cluster 0 – Water (rivers/sea), N=79.
Indeed, lantern series like Projektion für Alle, and many more of the slides analysed in this research, reflect and perpetuate the monumental and architectural traditions established in landscape drawings and urban photography, which, by the late nineteenth century, had become the dominant and stereotypical modes of representation – largely driven by the rise of visual promotional material.Footnote 43 Iconic and easily recognizable urban landmarks, such as churches, cathedrals, belfries, guild and city halls in the city centres of Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent and other Belgian cities, are deliberately framed from carefully selected vantage points that emphasize their grandeur (Figures 3–4). For instance, perspective techniques are employed to accentuate the height of Gothic spires or the imposing scale of monumental structures. These buildings are frequently photographed from a distance, often with a market square or an open street intersection in the foreground and clear skies in the background, reinforcing their visual prominence and singularity within the urban landscape. In some cases, historical sights are even isolated from their specific urban context, occupying the entire frame as canonical sites – an approach evident in a series of colour slides of Brussels featuring the Hallepoort Museum of Antiquities, the Royal Palace and other key architectural landmarks (Figure 5). In other slide series, we move still further from the outside to the inside, with interiors of nave views of churches and cathedrals being particularly common (Figure 6).
Figure 3. Cluster 2 – City views (square), N=98.
Figure 4. Cluster 3 – City views (round), N=59.
Figure 5. Cluster 4 – City views (colour), N=20.
Figure 6. Cluster 1 – Churches (inside), N=38.
A deliberate process of selection, emphasis and hierarchy is clearly at work in these lantern slide representations, portraying Belgian cities almost exclusively through their most imposing, often medieval and Catholic, monuments. Modern urban landmarks appear far less frequently, and when they do, they tend to be eclectic, historicist-style buildings that serve significant civic functions within the urban landscape (Figure 7) – such as railway stations, stock exchanges, the Palace of Justice or prominent historical statues (e.g. the Congress Column, and statues of Godfrey of Bouillon, Rubens, Jan Breydel and Pieter de Coninck).Footnote 44 These structures are largely depicted in isolation, detached from the broader historical transformations and urban renewal projects that reshaped Belgian city centres, particularly after the 1870s.Footnote 45 Notably, these buildings are also those most closely associated with national and municipal governance, symbolizing a contemporary material expression of civic authority and state power.
Figure 7. Boulevard Anspach (Source: Heilig Grafinstituut, Turnhout).
However, representations of buildings linked to the rapidly evolving industrial and commercial functions of Belgian cities are conspicuously absent, despite their ubiquity in Belgian cities and their status as a source of national pride during the period under study.Footnote 46 Factories, warehouses, slaughterhouses, gasworks and other urban industrial sites, as well as the emerging department stores, shopping streets and commercial hubs, are entirely omitted. This absence underscores the extent to which illustrated lectures in the early twentieth century remained firmly rooted in an antiquated vision of the Belgian ‘art city’ – a city defined by Catholic art, historical grandeur and bourgeois respectability, yet seemingly untouched by industrialization and commercial modernity.Footnote 47 Unsurprisingly, this idealized urban image also excludes visual depictions of cafés, restaurants, music halls and other spaces of nightlife and entertainment, further reinforcing a sanitized, culturally prestigious vision of the Belgian city.
The presence – or, more significantly, the conspicuous absence – of people in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photography has been a central point of discussion in scholarly literature, a discourse that is equally pertinent to the interpretation of the lantern slides series examined here. Media historian Steven Jacobs, for instance, has highlighted a persistent pictorial tradition of amor vacui – a tendency to depict the city as an empty, architectural space, virtually devoid of human presence.Footnote 48 This so-called ‘neutron bomb photography’, which eliminates traces of human life while preserving the built environment, can be traced back to the technological constraints of early photographic apparatuses, where long exposure times rendered the movement of people difficult to capture.Footnote 49 By the early twentieth century, however, advancements in photographic technology, particularly the advent of lighter, more portable and faster cameras, had transformed the medium. The widespread availability of the relatively inexpensive Kodak from the late 1880s onward – some models of which were also capable of producing postcards for promotional purposes – marked the advent of the snapshot and amateur street photography.Footnote 50 Scholars have observed how this technological shift introduced a new dynamism into visual culture, foreshadowing the emergence of motion pictures. For the first time, photography was able to fully capture the tumultuous energy, chaotic movement and kinetic vibrancy of urban life. In this way, photography effectively converged with Impressionism in the visual arts, transitioning from a static representation of the city as a still life to an immersive medium that foregrounded the sensory experience of modern urbanity.Footnote 51
Such photographic developments are particularly evident in numerous lantern slides depicting densely populated urban pageants, processions ‘in action’ and public festivities unfolding in the streets of Belgium (Figure 8). These civic celebrations, which gained prominence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often drew upon deliberately constructed, ‘invented’ folkloristic traditions designed to resonate with both local inhabitants and visiting tourists.Footnote 52 Nevertheless, many photographers – both professional and amateur – continued to favour compositions that suspended movement, opting instead to capture images of vacant Belgian cityscapes for symbolic, aesthetic and artistic reasons. Consequently, while some of the slides analysed here reflect the emergent, more dynamic snapshot aesthetic of the belle époque (Figures 9–10), the majority remain anchored in a distinctly romantic and symbolist fascination with villes mortes – the evocatively ‘silent’ and sepulchral urban landscapes popularized by Georges Rodenbach and widely embraced by municipal authorities around 1900 for urban promotion.Footnote 53 This tendency is particularly pronounced in slides depicting church interiors, where the deliberate exclusion of human figures redirects attention toward the architectural grandeur of the space and its sacred, Christian essence – a visual strategy deeply rooted in the seventeenth-century Dutch tradition of church interior painting (Figure 6).Footnote 54 A similar approach extends to urban exteriors, where, although the presence of people is often unavoidable, their arrangement within the composition is carefully orchestrated to align with an overarching sense of nostalgia and melancholic reflection.Footnote 55 Human figures frequently appear as ornamental elements within the urban landscape, their diminutive scale accentuating the monumentality of statues and buildings, or they are depicted gazing in reverence at the remnants of a glorified past (Figure 11).
Figure 8. Series of processions.
Figure 9. Malines, La Place (Source: Musée de la Photographie à Charleroi, Charleroi).
Figure 10. City of Antwerp (Source: Cinematek, Brussels).
Figure 11. Ghent, Porte Rabot (Source: Musée de la Photographie à Charleroi, Charleroi).
At times, human figures themselves assume the role of romanticized, picturesque elements – akin to folkloristic props frozen in time – functioning as the living counterparts to the historical façades that frame them. A recurring motif across many slide series, for instance, is the popular imagery of ‘milk girls with dog carts’, which, much like the civic pageants, aligns seamlessly with this aestheticized vision of the past (Figures 12–13).Footnote 56 Similarly, these civic processions, pageants and festivities were increasingly instrumentalized for urban promotion, civic identity formation and tourism, offering visitors tableaux vivants that staged an often-imagined yet seemingly authentic historical continuity. In this context, Belgian cities – along with the perceived ‘otherness’ of their inhabitants and their distinctive, localized traditions – were promoted and marketed as embodying a non-industrial, pre-modern authenticity. These qualities, framed as culturally and morally distinct – if not implicitly superior – to the modern present, reinforced the allure of Belgium as a destination steeped in historical charm and traditions. By the 1920s, such forms of ‘self-exoticization’ had become an entrenched component of how illustrated lectures represented and promoted Belgium’s art cities.
Figure 12. Brussels (Source: Cinematek, Brussels).
Figure 13. Milchverkäuferinnen, Belgien (Source: Projektion für Alle, 24 slides, 1910, Lucerna).
Establishing visual meaning and narrative coherence solely through a content analysis of lantern slides remains a complex and methodologically challenging endeavour. How these images of Belgian cities circulated and were employed varied significantly, as lecturers assembled slide series selectively, tailoring them to specific demands and didactic objectives.Footnote 57 Unlike moving images, lantern slides required verbal explanation and contextualization, with speakers actively ascribing meaning to each projected image to serve diverse social and cultural functions. To fully comprehend and interpret the role of illustrated lantern lectures and their significance in promoting Belgian cities at the turn of the twentieth century, it is essential to examine the institutional and organizational frameworks and contexts that facilitated their dissemination further. To this end, our analysis turns to the database of Belgian newspaper archives.
Depicting Belgian cities: revealing areas of focus in illustrated lectures
The slides that have survived the test of time paint a picture of how cities were promoted at the beginning of the twentieth century. Another key aspect is the frequency with which specific cities were featured in the lecture circuit, and the possible narratives constructed around them. These we can start to unearth through the analysed newspaper reports. Figures 14 and 15 chart the spatial distribution of cities and towns mentioned in lantern lectures reported in Antwerp and Brussels newspapers. While the high number of references to Antwerp and Brussels partly reflects our source bias, it also underscores a strong localist tendency. In the 1920s, nearly 75 per cent of Antwerp’s city-themed lantern lectures focused on Antwerp itself. In Brussels, this self-referential figure was around 50 per cent. In 1923–24, for instance, the chairman of the Iris photographic circle and enthusiastic photographer Emile Borrenberg lectured on ‘Antwerp, city of processions’ at three different locations in Antwerp.Footnote 58 In other words, strategies of place promotion primarily targeted local residents. This reveals a strong sense of civic pride and a desire to promote and affirm local and regional identities through visual media. Such sentiment was already rooted in nineteenth-century Belgium, but it was one which intensified in the inter-war years due to the rise of Flemish regionalism – with Antwerp being a particularly strong bulwark in this movement.Footnote 59 For Brussels, the self-referential nature of at least half of the lectures was closely connected to the city being the capital of the Belgian nation.
Figure 14. Cities discussed in unique lantern lectures and advertised in Antwerp and Brussels newspapers, 1902–04 (N=41).
Figure 15. Cities discussed in unique lantern lectures and advertised in Antwerp and Brussels newspapers, 1922–24 (N=111).
Interestingly enough, Figures 14–15 indicate how evolutions in lecturing about places not only reflected identity issues, but also broader tendencies in the development of tourism (promotion) in Belgium. Strictly speaking, not all of these lectures were given with tourism purposes in mind, but place attraction certainly became a recurrent and dominant theme. Our oldest sample, around 1900, for instance, reveals place-promotion lecturing almost exclusively focusing on the ‘travelogue’ genre (Table 2). This genre aligned with nineteenth-century traditions of virtual or ‘armchair’ travel. It emphasized the three ‘classic’ staples of Belgian tourism promotion: the Belgian coast, the picturesque Ardennes and the Flemish ‘art cities’.Footnote 60 These had become recognizable tourism products at the end of the nineteenth century, a tendency which was, apparently, further reinforced by illustrated lecturing. Thus, the seaside resorts of Ostend and Blankenberge pop up frequently in the lectures of the first sample period, as do a string of towns and places along the southern water estuary of the Samber, Maas and Amblève. Together with the renowned resort of Spa, Namur and Stavelot, these were considered prime tourist destinations at the turn of the century, since they allowed travellers to experience both ‘picturesque’ nature (the waterfalls of Coo near Stavelot) and culture (the romantic ruins of the Cistercian abbey near Villers-la-Ville, the medieval citadel of Namur, the Benedictine monastery of Stavelot). With Bruges, Ghent, Malines, Antwerp, Brussels and Tournai, all important ‘art cities’ were equally represented in lectures about Belgian places, while the royal palace in Laken (situated in Brussels) and the old Napoleonic battlefield of Waterloo were considered vaut le voyage due to their connection with Belgian history and identity.Footnote 61
Table 2. Thematic distribution of lantern lectures on Belgian cities, for each sample period (1902–04 and 1922–24, N=134)
The inter-war sample brought only subtle changes to the frequency of Belgian destinations under discussion, although thematic diversity in illustrated lectures focusing on Belgian places increased. While travelogues remained popular, more lectures now focused on cities’ historical, (social) economic, political and artistic significance. The ports of Bruges and Antwerp, for example, were discussed in terms of their important economic role, both in the past and in the present. The churches and historic architecture featured in lantern slides, discussed in the visual analysis, also found expression in lecture narratives. Lectures on the major cities, such as Antwerp and Brussels, focused on their role in Belgium and Flemish (art) history, evidently contributing to both civic pride, identity politics and tourist purposes at the same time. The incipient tourist industry, moreover, had discovered the charm of small ‘old towns’ like Oudenaarde, which was singled out in illustrated lectures aimed at tourists for ‘its monuments, its art treasures and its ancient crafts’.Footnote 62 Other sights in the south (the church of Péruwelz, the Louis XIII chateau of Trazegnies) were added to the travel itineraries in Belgium as well. The addition of Nieuwpoort and especially Ypres was a reflection of the growing war tourism in Belgium after the Great War, but could also have been added to the roster of lecturing topics that discussed the recent dramatic events of the war in Belgian and Flemish national history.Footnote 63
The description of some place-sensitive lectures allows us to go deeper into what lecturers talked about and showed to the attending audiences. Antwerp was promoted for its parks and museums. ‘Antwerp’s past: its origins, flourishing, progress, struggles and hopeful future’ was also highlighted.Footnote 64 Moreover, historical lectures could take the form of a visual journey, as the following quote from the review of the lecture testifies: ‘so clear were the slides, and so clear the explanations, that everyone really thought they had made a personal study trip’.Footnote 65 Antwerp’s churches, the Steen, Saint Julian’s Guesthouse, the vanished old city gates and Blue Tower, and its processions were all parts of Antwerp promoted in the lecture circuit. But lectures also highlighted the modern beauties of Antwerp, in its role as a commercial and industrial metropolis.Footnote 66 Although, as indicated in our visual analysis, most of the images shown remained rather traditional, the topics of these lectures, thus, indicate a broader social trend in the interbellum years where heritage and art from the past increasingly interacted with discourses on what was new and modern about a city.Footnote 67 Lectures like ‘Old and new Malines’ captured the interplay between heritage and modernization.Footnote 68
Brussels, for its part, was presented in terms of its military history, (old) churches, but also through the Palais de la Nation and Palais de Nassau, emphasizing the court and capital function of the city within the Belgian nation-state.Footnote 69 Contemporary social debates, such as the north–south rail connection in Brussels, were also addressed in lectures that sought to celebrate the modernity of the capital. For Ghent, too, the old attractions were highlighted, with the city being described as ‘the city of monuments’, alongside more modern imagery that sold the city as one of ‘flowers’ and ‘palaces’, or more neutrally, as ‘the city of Leie and Scheldt’.Footnote 70 Bruges, ‘la Belle’ or ‘die Schone’, on the other hand, was marketed almost exclusively as a city of art and ancient art treasures.Footnote 71 It had attracted tourist attention from early on and was considered the heritage jewel in Belgium’s crown.Footnote 72
Despite local differences, a shared logic of place promotion and local boosterism emerges: cities were framed as unique yet competitive entities, using historical depth and cultural prestige to carve out distinctive civic, national and regional identities. As the visual analysis has already revealed, images of heritage, history and a society frozen in time were often used for this purpose. It is also striking that in the descriptions of the cities uncovered through newspaper research modernity and economic prowess are emphasized. The latter would have been used rather for (local) civic identity, while the former would have been utilized more for tourist purposes. That these slides have been preserved chiefly in (international) collections is not particularly surprising.
To fully comprehend and interpret the role of illustrated lantern lectures and their significance in promoting Belgian cities at the turn of the twentieth century, it is essential to examine the institutional and organizational frameworks and contexts that facilitated their dissemination in greater depth. We explore this in the final section.
Promoting Belgian cities: unearthing the societal logics of illustrated lectures
Which actors were involved in the promotion of Belgian cities and towns through lantern slides, and what were their primary – often overlapping – motivations? Understanding the social logic behind lectures focusing on Belgian places and especially cities and towns, allows us better to place our visual and newspaper analysis in perspective. This last section will show that place lecturing in Belgium went hand in glove with the expression of national and regional identities, local pride and feelings of civic community. Emerging tourism marketing seems to have been fully entangled with these processes.Footnote 73
Lectures were commonly scheduled in the autumn and winter, often on Monday or Thursday evenings. While most were one-off events, some speakers toured multiple cities with the same talk. The illustrated lecturing network itself was far from homogeneous. It comprised various overlapping national and international organizational circuits, with lecturers moving between cities and often addressing diverse audiences with the same, or slightly adjusted talks. Organizing associations differed in their missions and target demographics, which influenced the thematic content and speaker profiles of the events.Footnote 74 Around 1900, audiences could attend all sorts of lectures, from religious, (popularizing) scientific, social, (art) historical, to travel lectures.Footnote 75 Lectures focusing on Belgian places, had predominantly an (art) historical or cultural goal in mind, informing the audiences about the heritage and socio-cultural benefits of the places discussed. Around 1900, lectures on places mainly took the form of informed travelogues (Table 2), informing people about the potential of places for visits. But by the 1920s, the topics had diversified, discussing not just history, art and culture, but also economics and social developments in the cities involved. This result ties in with our findings in the previous section, stressing how from the inter-war years onwards, Belgian cities and towns were no longer exclusively promoted by referencing the past, but also by stressing the potential of place for modern developments and the future. A widening diversity in topics was also mirrored in the different backgrounds of the speakers in the Belgian lecture circuit. Speakers ranged from teachers and curators to lawyers, engineers and the clergy – typically middle-aged, middle-class men with public-speaking experience and social prestige. The same profiles took to the podium in the inter-war period, with academics, curators, military personnel and religious figures also speaking at length about (their) cities. They thus reflect the profile of the average speaker in the broader lecture circuit.Footnote 76 The only difference is that women were largely absent from this niche of Belgian cities (promotion), although some participated in the broader travel lecture genre, mainly discussing places outside of Belgium.Footnote 77
A few illustrated lectures on Belgian cities and towns were organized by real professionals in their domains, for instance, Alfons Van Werveke, curator of the Ghent Museum of Antiquities and Historical Monuments. Recent research into the Commission for Tourism Promotion for Ghent shows that in the period 1922–37, Van Werveke gave at least 32 tourist lectures, most of them with the lantern (26), on the curiosities of Ghent and the art treasures of the region of East Flanders. He lectured in Ghent, but also elsewhere in Belgium and even as far away as The Hague.Footnote 78 Other speakers may not have had a direct link with important civic institutions and emerging tourism organizations, but were equally skilled at lecturing about and promoting particular cities through their profession and passion. Archivist, historian, archaeologist, and professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Guillaume Des Marez (1870–1931, Figure 16), for instance, published several illustrated guides and historical works. He highlighted Brussels in the early 1920s from various perspectives, but especially from a historical and monumental point of view, focusing on the sort of visual imagery analysed in the section above.Footnote 79 A lecture on 6 November 1922 on the interior of St Carolus Church by Reverend Father Peeters for the Antiquarian Society in Antwerp would certainly have had a more art-historical, spiritual angle.Footnote 80
Figure 16. Photo of Guillaume Des Marez (Source: Annuaire de l’Académie royale de Belgique, 1934, p. 149).
Getting a clear picture of who attended the lectures remains a thorny issue in lantern research. Recent studies suggest increasing accessibility and democratization from 1900 onward. More lectures became free and open to the public, attracting a broader social mix, including more women and younger attendees.Footnote 81 Popular universities and university extensions in Belgium aimed to reach wide demographics, while scientific and civic groups often targeted elite male circles.Footnote 82 Both types of organization were influential in the Belgian lantern lecture circuit, next to professional, cultural, health and social organizations – all aimed at a more mixed audience.Footnote 83 We observe the same trend when looking only at the part of the lantern lecture circuit engaged in discussing Belgian cities and towns. For example, when newspaper articles announcing lantern lectures on Belgian places mentioned the entrance fee, these were mainly publicly accessible and free of charge. This indicates that great importance was attached to the wider dissemination of knowledge about cities and civic identities in Belgium, and the growing role such lectures placed in fostering identity and (tourist) promotion of Belgian places. Since such lectures evidently had to reach as many people as possible – both from the perspective of encouraging civic pride and for economic reasons – financial barriers were obviously not erected.
The type of organizing institution largely determined the intended audience. Educational institutions, such as the popular universities and university extensions, were the most active organizers of place-promotion lectures, especially in the early twentieth century (41.18 per cent, Table 3). They aimed to disseminate knowledge, promote civic pride and cultivate responsible citizenship. Spreading geographical knowledge by travel lecturing was an important part of this.Footnote 84 Elements of nationalism, emerging regionalism and aspects of local community were also being encouraged through these goals. After all, extramural adult education also aimed to uplift the (urban) masses, maintain the existing social order and create responsible citizens through education and knowledge transfers. Indeed, promoting cities at home through illustrated lecturing could elicit a certain local identity as well as national pride, certainly in the case of the court and capital city of Brussels. Flemish associations like the Catholic University Extension emphasized the regional Flemish heritage and identity, tying city promotion to broader cultural and political goals and motivations.Footnote 85
Table 3. Types of organizing institutions of lantern lectures on Belgian cities, for each sample period (1902–04 and 1922–24, N=134)
By the 1920s, a more diverse range of organizations, including scientific societies and cultural associations, had joined the field. Our analysis confirms an attested growing differentiation of associations in inter-war Belgium that were involved in promoting places, and more specifically, cities.Footnote 86 For instance, cultural organizations such as the Cercle artistique et littéraire, the Catholic Circle and the Davidsfonds, and scientific organizations like the geographical circles also emerged as major players in both sample periods. The latter aimed to popularize geographic and cultural-ethnographic knowledge, and significantly, also promoted Antwerp as a place of modern, colonial trade and development.Footnote 87 Geographical circles, sometimes, ventured even into direct tourist promotion, with titles such as ‘A walk through Brussels’.Footnote 88 Cultural organizations approached place promotion primarily from an (art) historical and identity-minded perspective, with tourism being almost always part of such a motivational mix.
Surprisingly enough, tourism organizations themselves remained relatively marginal in early public lecture circuits. In the first sample period (1902–04), the Touring Club of Belgium, established in 1895, and an important and popular automobile association, only organized one lecture.Footnote 89 At the end of the nineteenth century, emerging touring clubs and automobile associations in Belgium and abroad gave their members the chance to visit less-famous regions, medieval towns and rustic villages in their own countries. Nationalism was one of the driving forces here.Footnote 90 Tourism organizations, however, seem to have been fairly slow to target broad sections of the population during the first decades of the twentieth century by incorporating the well-known popularizing medium of the projection lantern in their propaganda strategies. Indeed, such direct promotional schemes only appeared systematically in Belgium in the inter-war period, when they were also mentioned explicitly in the Belgian newspapers.Footnote 91 A 1923 newspaper article, for instance, praised the combination of lantern images, and the emerging medium of the tourist film as the ‘example to follow to make our Belgian sites and our tourist organization known’.Footnote 92 The organization most active in promoting Belgium became the Association for the Conservation of Natural and Urban Beauty. The Flemish Tourist Association had also taken on this specific task, but concentrated primarily on foreign countries. These tourist organizations focused on providing information to (potential) travellers and responding to the growing demand for practical information within the tourism landscape.Footnote 93
Like the Catholic Flemish University Extension that aspired to inculcate Flemish pride and emancipation, similar motives also inspired the Flemish Tourist Association, which was convinced that tourism was an appropriate tool for fostering Flemish identity. Deeming the Touring Club of Belgium too French-minded, they countered by offering services in Dutch.Footnote 94 This became the language in which most lantern lectures on Belgian cities were given from the inter-war years onwards. In the inter-war period, almost half of the lantern lectures on Belgian cities were reported on exclusively in Dutch (probably an indicator of the language spoken during these lectures), while in 1902–04 they had been announced almost exclusively in French. A major Dutchification thus occurred in the field of place promotion. Many of these lantern lectures also increasingly took place in the pillarized public sphere, meaning they were only announced in a newspaper of the same ideology (Catholic, liberal or socialist). This shift confirms the observation in the existing literature of growing competition among ideological and linguistic blocs within Belgium from the 1920s onwards.Footnote 95
The goals behind these lectures were complex and overlapping: tourism, civic pride, cultural education and political identity-building. What is clear is that lantern lectures became a widely used and influential medium for representing and promoting Belgian cities to a broad and evolving public. The growing popularity of discussing Belgian cities and towns followed the increasing number of tourism activities within the country.Footnote 96 These findings are in line with what Storm understands by regionalism and the emerging civic publicity movement in England identified by Hulme.
Conclusion
Getting to know cities, and eliciting interest in them by producing and projecting photographic slides, became common practice in the early twentieth-century public sphere in Belgium, as elsewhere in Europe and the world. However, the medium of the projection lantern has long been overlooked in historical studies of place promotion, while, conversely, media and lantern studies have mainly focused on travelogues depicting exotic and remote places. This holds true for the Belgian research context, as well as for an international historiography. The lantern, however, increasingly became the medium of choice around 1900 to boost and promote the attraction of places, thus playing a hitherto underacknowledged role in showcasing cities and towns in Belgium and elsewhere. Within Belgium, lectures depicting the nation’s regions, and more specifically its ‘art cities’, the Ardennes and the Belgian coast, played a growing role, concomitant with the rising promotion of tourism, the cultivation of civic pride and the construction of local, regional and national identities. We have argued in this article that historians should re-evaluate the importance of the lantern, as well as its lantern slides, for studying and unearthing key imagery and organizations, which were instrumental in popularizing and promoting Belgian cities and towns at the start of the twentieth century.
When examining which Belgian cities were represented in lantern lectures, what stood out was the large number of self-referential lectures in Antwerp and Brussels. Our source bias is an important consideration here, but it also indicates the persistence of nineteenth-century urban pride and local identity politics. In line with mass democratization, it was believed that citizens should be made increasingly aware of their local heritage. Homegrown (art) historical knowledge, as well as the touristic promotion of place, could build up and foster such confidence and pride in local contexts. The inter-war period brought only subtle changes in this regard. One of the most interesting developments concerned an increasing awareness and promotion of Belgium’s cities and towns as places of modernity and progress. Clearly, these changing tendencies reflected a growing national, and especially Flemish pride, as well as being indicative of the role assigned to lantern lectures in modern society. Educational institutions, such as popular universities and university extensions, proved particularly active in introducing broad layers of the Belgian population to images of its cities and regions. Their goals for doing so were aimed as much at building civic communities and confident identities as they were about widening social, and eventually also tourist, interest in Belgian places. This form of education sought to uplift growing groups of (urban) citizens with increasing time and money to spend, and, in doing so, maintain the existing social order and create responsible citizens through education and knowledge transfer. The Dutchification of lantern lectures on Belgian cities from the 1900s to the 1920s is particularly noteworthy, with place lecturing increasingly regarded as an appropriate tool for Flemish identity-building and promotion.
Additional information in newspaper articles, as well as a visual analysis of surviving lantern slides themselves, provide more insight into how Belgian cities and towns were portrayed and represented. Whereas our newspaper information seems to indicate that narratives increasingly juxtaposed heritage and art from the past with discourses on what was new and modern about Belgian cities – especially from the inter-war years onwards – no such contrast was observable in our visual material. Rather, the dominance of a somewhat stereotypical representation of the Belgian urban landscape in the early decades of the twentieth century emerges, that is, a depiction of quaint historical cities near canals and waterways. Going to a lecture about Belgian places at the start of the twentieth century meant being taken on a tour of the most important architectural and monumental highlights of a city. Visiting such places through lantern lecturing entailed watching a series of slides on urban landmarks, monuments and church interiors, mostly dating back to the Christian Middle Ages. Images of modern buildings did appear, but they were restricted to new expressions of civic progress and pride: statues glorifying the local, regional and national past, a new railway station, a palace of justice, etc. Urban living, the hustle and bustle of people on the street and the industrial and commercial progress driving the nation forward were conspicuously absent themes on lantern slides. In stark contrast to the modernizing narrative around Belgian cities and towns, these same places were mainly portrayed in still life and funereal images, not as something changing and alive. A more modern depiction of urban living only started to gain prominence after our sample periods, and, tellingly, mainly through artful ‘city symphonies’ and genuine ‘tourist films’ captured in moving images.Footnote 97 Despite its widespread use and popularity – and even paradoxically so – the lantern became, therefore, literally an ‘outdated’ mode of representation, focused more on the glorious heritage of the past than on modern advancements taking place within its ‘art cities’. With the advent of sound in film at the end of the 1920s, the lantern itself was also destined to be superseded by more modern media and modes of representation.
Appendix 1: Newspaper selection, database construction and analysis
The representative corpus of newspapers was digitally and – where necessary – analogously searched using 26 keywords referring to the lantern.Footnote 98 For different samples, including the 1902–04 and 1922–24 samples on which this article is based, different types of information were extracted from the relevant newspaper articles and processed into a database consisting of 128 columns and 8,358 rows.Footnote 99 The main columns contained information from the collected newspaper articles: keyword by which the article was found; name, day, month, year, ideology, language and place of publication of the newspaper; day, month, year and time of the lecture; title of the lecture; speaker’s first name, surname and occupation; name of the lecture’s organizer; location (house number, street, city and country) of the lecture, information about the audience (and their reactions); price of admission; language spoken during the lecture; when the slides were shown; duration of the lecture; whether cinema was also used; and whether there were any technical problems. Of course, not all this information was found for every lantern lecture, but it was supplemented as fully as possible. Additional columns facilitated analysis, such as standardization, as well as divisions into further categories (for example thematic categories for lecture titles). Categorization allows for a recognition of broad patterns. They are, however, inevitably somewhat arbitrary, as some lantern lectures were at the intersection of different categories, nor could all topics be neatly placed in one of the main categories. For example, lectures that only gave ‘Italy’ as their subject were classified under ‘travel’. If the announcement mentioned ‘the history of’, the lecture was categorized as ‘history’. Specifically, lantern lectures on Belgium were of interest for this article. Where possible, the cities discussed in these lectures were further identified and visualized by (Historical) Geographic Information Systems ((H)GIS). The potential of GIS for tourism and lantern research is too large a subject to discuss within the scope of this article.Footnote 100
Appendix 2: Lantern selection, CLIP analysis and methodology
Given the main focus of this theme issue, the main slide selection criterion was that they should depict Belgian cities. The selection of these images was based on metadata, such as the title of the slides or notes on the edge of the slides. Whenever a city was mentioned in these, whatever was depicted, it was included in the selection, resulting in 518 slides. These were used for Figure 17. The slides came from the Lucerna database and from other Belgian digitized slides collections of the B-magic consortium, namely the Musée de la Photographie (Charleroi), the Museum Dr Guislain (Ghent), the CINEMATEK (Brussels), the Heilig Grafinstituut (Turnhout), Ursulineninstituut (Onze-Lieve-Vrouw-Waver), and In Flanders Fields Museum (Ypres). These collections included material for a variety of purposes: science, education, politics, religion, art history, geography, industry, leisure, entertainment, etc.Footnote 101 The distinction was and still is not always clear. Therefore, we cannot determine with certainty whether or not they were used for city promotion. The analysis therefore focuses on how cities were depicted (and not necessarily promoted). The digital techniques we apply, however, require uniformity. Differences in the ways slides were scanned – for example, photographing them in constantly changing angles or with differently shaped borders – would lead the AI models explained below to focus on these formal differences and largely ignore patterns in content. In the end, only 294 slides proved suitable for image analysis.
Figure 17. Belgian cities appearing in the slide collections of Lucerna and B-magic (N=518).
We applied visual clustering techniques to identify visual themes in the collection of 294 slides. These techniques are based on a multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) model called CLIP (Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training). Trained on 400 million image–text combinations (photographs or other images combined with some form of textual description), CLIP learns to connect images and texts, that is, it learns which words are good predictors of visual elements and vice versa. Previous research showed that multimodal models can be fruitfully used by (digital) historians and humanities specialists, but also that they can be effectively applied to digitized lantern slides and other visual historical sources.Footnote 102 In most applications, multimodal machine learning is used for a so-called cross-modal retrieval task.Footnote 103 Because the model has a good idea of which images and captions belong together, we can use textual prompts to find specific kinds of images in a historical dataset. For example, we can use the prompt ‘an image of a cathedral’ to find images of cathedrals or ‘a photograph of the Grote Markt in Antwerp’ to find images of Antwerp in our 294 digitized slides. To perform this task, the model must produce an effective numerical representation, called an embedding, of each image in our dataset.
For the retrieval task, the model calculates the distance between the embedding of our prompt and the embeddings of the images in our dataset. Because these embeddings have to contain relevant information about the content of the images, we can use the distance between them to cluster the images based on visual characteristics. More specifically, we apply the K-means algorithm, which can be used to partition n observations – the embeddings of the 294 digitized slides in our case – into K non-overlapping clusters (Figures 2–6). Because K-means is a purely mathematical operation, it has no idea what the optimal number for K should be. Following standard practice, we use the ‘elbow’ method to find the mathematically optimal number for K, which is five in our case. It must be noted that the resulting clusters are mathematically perfect but are not necessarily relevant for a quantitative analysis. In other words, we have to interpret whether they correspond to relevant visual themes. We do this by visualizing the 10 images that are nearest and farthest from the cluster centroid: the mean (average) position of all data points within a cluster. In other words, we determine the validity of the clusters by inspecting the 10 most typical and the 10 most atypical (outlier) images per cluster.
Acknowledgments
The idea for this article originated with Ilja Van Damme who is doing close reading research on (tourist) imagery of Belgian cities on the basis of ephemeral visual material, such as lantern slides. Margo Buelens-Terryn constructed the database of lantern lectures as part of her Ph.D. research (supervised by Van Damme, Iason Jongepier and Kurt Vanhoutte) which forms the basis of our analysis in part 2, while Thomas Smits performed the distant reading CLIP-analysis explained under part 1. All authors participated equally in writing all parts of this article. We would like to thank the co-authors of this special issue, the editors and anonymous reviewers of Urban History for their insightful comments, who significantly helped us in improving the structure and argument of this article.
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