Alexander Black

“When I outlined my plan to certain writers and artists, the response was unanimously discouraging. A typical warning came from J. Wells Champney. Champney was one of the painters who took a real interest in photography. He had persuaded me to speak on photography and art at the National Academy. He brought about the presentation of the same exposition before New York’s leading photographic society. But photographed fiction — that’s what he saw as impossible. “Why,” he said, “you know how stiff a photographed group looks. Imagine a succession of these! No, it can’t be done.”

As an incentive this decision was perfect. A sympathetic prophesy of failure prodded me into proving that the prophet was wrong.”

-Alexander Black,  Time and Chance; Adventures with People and Print

“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. . . Black arrived at a rate of four slides a minute for his presentation…”

– A Million and One Nights, A Million and One Nights: The History of the Motion Picture, Terry Ramsaye

Full Text

“Who invented the cinema? Was it Thomas Edison or the Lumière brothers? Were motion pictures born when Eadweard Muybridge famously photographed Leland Stanford’s horse in Palo Alto in 1877? One important contender for the title of film forefather, often overlooked today, is Alexander Black. At a time when most films lasted only a few moments, Black toured the turn-of-the-century United States with his multi-act “picture plays.” These live screen performances combined the spoken word with projected magic lantern slides, which Black carefully calibrated to suggest movement as he dissolved from one slide to the next. Black’s work with motion picture technologies conveys the passion of a lifelong experimenter. “

—Kaveh Askari,  “Alexander Black, Film Pioneer” BAMFA/Pacific Film Archives: Article | PDF of program from 2009 screening 

“At the dawn of the moving image, there was a plethora of initiatives that sought to reproduce reality in images. In 1894, one year before the Lumière brothers patented their cinematograph, the journalist, photographer and writer Alexander Black developed the picture play system. This fused images together to create a new form of audiovisual narration with which he aspired to create “an illusion of reality”. He refined the expressive capacities of existing photography to try to recreate what the first attempts to reproduce moving images could not achieve, namely, to tell complete stories using images. For his first work he chose to relate the tribulations of a young journalist: Miss Jerry. In the formative period of the cinema, Black’s contribution – midway between photography and cinema – had no influence at all on the technical development of the new medium; it was, however, an elaborate antecedent of the construction of visual narratives and his success showed that the public was prepared to welcome cinematographic stories. The image of journalism provided by Miss Jerry also anticipated one of the most solid stereotypes of the woman-journalist in the cinema, known as the sob-sister.”

-Peña-Fernández, Simón & Lazkano-Arrillaga, Iñaki. “Alexander Black’s Miss Jerry (1894). A journalist in the prehistory of cinema.” Comunicacion y Sociedad.  (2017). Researchgate