Alexander Black (photographer)

On the lyceum circuit, Black presented a magic lantern show of candid photography called "Life through a Detective Camera" (alternately titled "Ourselves as Others See Us") in 1889.

Inspired by audience responses to these lectures, as well as emerging work by Eadward Muybridge capturing the effect of motion in photography, Black began to develop a plan to bring fiction to life through dissolving slides.

The finished work debuted before a live audience on October 9, 1894 at Carbon Studio, featuring a "slow movie" composed of over one hundred glass slide photographs of posed motion, accompanied by a feature-length script.

"While the motion picture was progressing with mincing steps in the peep show Edison Kinetoscope the sheer force of the evolution of expression presented the world with an interesting paradox – the birth of the photoplay upon the screen.

Slides were dissolved using a double "magic" lantern, allowing the appearance of characters moving against a fixed background, at a rate of one approximately every 15 seconds.