John Rahill's Magic Lantern

I have been passionate about photography since, as a boy of 12 in Russia, I learned the magic of creating black and white prints by hand. Armed only with my grandfather’s vintage cameras and an enlarger, I quickly became enthralled by the history of the medium and its traditions. By the time I was in college, those traditions were being steamrolled by digital photography. I was determined to remain loyal to traditional film.

Fast forward to 2005. I was attending San Jose State University, seeking my BFA degree in Visual Art, with a concentration in photography. I was also dating a lovely girl, Rachel, from the rolling hills of Northern California’s Sonoma County. One day Rachel asked me to help a pottery artist, Barbara Hoffman, translate some text on the back of photographs that her grandfather had taken in Russia.

When I arrived at Barbara’s modest but lovely home I found multiple boxes filled with hand-colored images on glass, stacks of tiny monochromatic prints, and bundles of note cards filled with typewritten text. There was also a very large, black metal projector in its original purple felt-lined case. It looked as if the projector had barely been used.

It did not take more than a few minutes of examining the slides and prints to realize that this was an amazing and beautiful photographic archive. It was lost history waiting to be found.

Barbara said she knew very little about the images, except that they were taken by her grandfather while on a long trip to Russia during the First World War. Other than his name — John Wells Rahill — very little information about his journey to Russia had been passed down. Barbara was the only child of Rahill’s daughter, and by the time she learned of the slides, her mother had developed Alzheimer’s. Most of the family history had been lost.

This marked the beginning of a seven-year odyssey, as I became consumed with researching this amazing archive and its creator.

In 1917, as the First World War dragged on in European trenches, John Wells Rahill was working as a pastor in Cleveland, Ohio. A recent graduate of the Yale School of Divinity, John had written his thesis on “The Contribution of Christianity to Socialism,” been captain of the tennis team, graduated with honors, and was one of five students chosen to address the class at graduation. John also had an interest in Russian art and culture, as well as photography and moving pictures.

At some point during his ministry in Cleveland, John heard that the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) was looking for men to travel to Russia through their War Works Department. John answered the call, seeing it as a perfect opportunity to witness a nation being born halfway across the globe.

John Rahill was just 28 in 1917, and his first child was born in June. But in October he set sail from California to Vladivostok, embarking on the adventure of a lifetime.

The YMCA had set up shop in Russia in 1899. Its headquarters were located in Petrograd* and the branch was named Mayak (Lighthouse). Besides being a religious organization, the YMCA focused on physical education and was, among other things, responsible for introducing volleyball to Russia.

During WWI, YMCA volunteers provided some logistical support for troop movements behind the lines and offered rest and relaxation programs that helped ease the harsh realities of trench warfare.

Armed only with a Kodak camera and a Russian language study guide, John sailed across the Pacific toward the unknown, determined to contribute in any way he could. After landing in Japan, John and the group of about a dozen other YMCA workers made their way to Vladivostok, then on to Petrograd via the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

John’s personal assignment took him still further west, to the Northern Front, where he was assigned to the small village of Valk (today known as Valga; the town straddles the Latvian-Estonian border). There he was ordered to set up a Soldiers’ Home — a place where soldiers could take a break from the horrors of war during the four days leave from the front lines they received after every 14 days of fighting.

In a field report dated January 5, 1918, John wrote of the successful conversion of the local schoolhouse into a Soldiers’ Home, and that on one night the visiting crowd of soldiers was some 1200 strong. Activities offered at the home included theatrical performances, movie nights, letter-writing services, games, big band nights and English classes (in which over 100 soldiers enrolled). The facility also had a tearoom, where one night over 1000 cups of tea were served. However, John’s report ended on a worrisome note. All was not proceeding entirely smoothly, he said, as some questions were being raised about who controlled his Soldiers’ Home.

During his stay in Valk, John visited the front lines and the surrounding villages. He visited his friend Tom Cotton in nearby Pskov. Enchanted by the beauty of the Russian countryside, John wrote home about the great devotion shown by the faithful during local church services. John carried his trusty foldout Kodak camera wherever he traveled, documenting his unfolding adventure.

Of course, while John and other YMCA workers were busy helping out behind the scenes in the war, the Bolshevik Revolution was putting down roots. In fact, the new Bolshevik government had grown wary of religious and international organizations working inside Russia. In the spring of 1918, the YMCA and all of its members were ordered to leave the country. All of the 50-plus volunteers were summoned to Samara for a meeting to discuss the fate of the YMCA in Russia.

To get to Samara, John had to travel through Moscow. The destruction wrought by the revolution was fully evident; many buildings had been destroyed. At the Baranov Photographic Studio on Malaya Sukharevskaya Square, Rahill purchased over 50 Magic Lantern slides shot in recent years, from the peaceful days of the monarchy right through the melee of revolutionary events. A few images showed Moscow buildings in their prerevolutionary state, and John re-photographed the same structures — now destroyed — from the same angles with his Kodak.

John’s Magic Lantern slide acquisition could not have been more timely. A short while later, by some accounts, the Bolsheviks began seeking out photographers and destroying their prints and negatives, in order to erase the pre-revolutionary visual record.** Today, the images John purchased are some of the few surviving Magic Lantern slides produced in Russia.

Invented in the mid-sixteenth century in Europe, the Magic Lantern uses a concave mirror and a light source to throw images from slides onto a wall or screen. By the time of Rahill’s discovery of the medium, the Magic Lantern’s light source had progressed from candles to limelight to incandescent bulbs. As color photography was not widespread until the 1930s, Magic Lantern slides were black and white images colorized to simulate real life.

The YMCA’s Samara meeting took place on March 28, 1918, just over three weeks after the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty between Soviet Russia and Germany. Most volunteers wanted to leave Russia, for a variety of reasons — some cited the end of the war, others were homesick, and still others were exhausted from dealing with the local bureaucracy; most all were discouraged by the limited effect of their efforts.

While in Samara waiting for the meeting to begin, John visited a busy marketplace and photographed merchants hawking their wares. He also encountered a sight that earned two exposures — a caravan of five camels pulling large sani sleds through the snowy city streets. In fact, Rahill opted not to stay in the city through the meeting, as he had already decided to leave Russia. Accompanied by a few other YMCA workers, he boarded the Trans-Siberian and headed home.

Due to the incipient Civil War and troop movements along the railroad, the return trip took far longer than normal, giving John plenty of time to take more photographs. He captured images of Russian troops returning home from the trenches and German and other POWs making their way back to Europe. YMCA members were active at every stop and engaged the locals with simple games. John skillfully photographed that, as well as Russians congregating on platforms, waiting in line for hot water, or selling candy and cigarettes to passengers.

YMCA workers entertaining locals during a Trans-Siberian stop.

To get home, the YMCA party had to traverse China and, since by that point they were no longer in the middle of a Civil War, they detoured to Peking (Beijing) for a few days. There, John and his companions soaked in the wonders of the Orient, visiting the Forbidden City — then only recently opened to mere mortals. They witnessed an elaborate funeral procession and meandered the narrow streets of the ancient city before heading farther east to Japan.

Yokohama was their port of departure from Japan, and Rahill again took time to savor the foreign city. Shinto shrines, Zen temples, pilgrimage paths, and the towns and villages of this exotic land all attracted his camera’s attention. YMCA members were captured in traditional Japanese robes or trying to use chopsticks.

One of the first Japanese cities opened for foreign trade with the outside world, Yokohama had a busy export district, filled with silk stores, spice shops and artists and craftsmen of every kind. While exploring that part of the city, John came upon a professional photo shop owned by Nobukuni Enami (known as T. Enami), one of Japan’s finest photographers and leading colorists. Japanese artists have always been at the forefront of miniature painting and their skills translated perfectly to this medium — Magic Lantern glass slides measure only about two inches by three inches, so coloring them requires a high degree of precision and skill. John was enthralled by Enami’s exquisitely colored slides and purchased about 20 of them.

Rahill returned to the US in May 1918, just short of seven months after he set out. He connected with other YMCA members who had been in Russia during the same period and also documented their visits with photography. He traded some important images with them in order to augment his collection.

Rahill’s goal was to share his experiences with American audiences, in order to explain the YMCA’s work and to bridge the gap between Russia and the US. Undoubtedly the potential of the Magic Lantern was central to his plan. A major method of communication and entertainment for over 250 years, the Magic Lantern allows slides to be easily shown to large groups of people in a lecture-show format.

Yet John did not want his slides to be merely educational, but to be held up as examples of fine art. With this in mind, he sent his freshly developed negatives and black and white proof prints to Japan, to be made into Magic Lantern slides and colored by the craftsmen in T. Enami’s studio. Meanwhile, he typed up over 400 index cards to help him with his future lectures. He also bought the best Lantern projector currently on the market — a 1918 Bausch + Lomb Duoscope, capable of projecting both transparent and reflective media and designed for projecting the largest possible image in small- to medium-sized spaces.

Yet one thing Rahill could not have anticipated was the rapidly changing public attitude toward Russia and the changes taking place there. After their return from the newly bolshevized Russia, many YMCA workers found themselves blacklisted as communist sympathizers. Despite graduating from highly respected universities like Harvard, Yale and Stanford, many had a difficult time finding work in the ministry.

By the time his colorized slides arrived from Japan, John had realized that American audiences were not ready or willing to embrace the YMCA’s efforts in Russia, no matter how worthy they may have been from a humanitarian standpoint. As a matter of fact, John’s own family did not look favorably upon his grand adventure. After all, he had been absent for seven months of his new daughter’s first year of life. And so, after finding work as a pastor of First Congregational Church in Topeka, Kansas, Rahill stowed his collection of slides, along with the lecture cards, proof prints, and projector, in a large metal trunk in his basement.

The collection would lie forgotten for the next 80 years.

A few months after my first meeting with Barbara, I borrowed the collection in order to organize it and become more familiar with its contents. After carefully examining each image, I realized that I had a closer personal connection with it than I could ever have imagined.

There were multiple images of the train station in Omsk — the city where my mother’s family lived until the late 1920s. I wondered if any of the people caught in the background of Rahill’s images might be distant relatives. I also found a photograph depicting barricades on Moscow’s Arbat Square. In 1977, almost exactly 60 years after Rahill’s photograph, I was born just half a block away.

Garlic sellers in Samara.

But there was another thing. Studying the images, I became acutely aware of John’s superior talent as a photographer; most of the images seemed almost too perfect to have been created using the meager equipment he had at his disposal. His camera had only two shutter speed settings, both of which would be considered too slow by today’s standards. Yet with this primitive camera he was able to capture candid moments with an extraordinary degree of precision (and remember, this is not digital photography; you didn’t get to see the results of your snap until weeks or months later, when the film was developed). I grew to admire his photographic skills as much as the historic aspect of his work.

After returning the slides, I asked Barbara to consider selling the collection to me. Only five years later did she agree to let it go, hoping that I could bring the material to the public in a way that she was no longer able. In the interim, I conceived the idea of returning to Russia in 2017 and retracing Rahill’s route, re-photographing the same locations exactly 100 years later. I would use the same model of Kodak camera and load it with film that was in production at the time of John’s journey. I would create a second set of Magic Lantern slides to honor the efforts of John and other YMCA workers. Together, the two sets of slides will carry the history forward for centuries to come. RL

In all, the John Rahill photographic collection contains about 700 prints and 580 Magic Lantern slides. In order to bring Rahill’s wonderful, historic images to audiences across the US, Anton Orlov travels the country and exhibits the slides in the form of Magic Lantern Slide Shows in the manner Rahill envisioned nearly a century ago. Through the slide show, he also illuminates the history of the Magic Lantern. Anton Orlov can be contacted at [email protected].

* St. Petersburg until 1914, renamed Leningrad in 1924, and St. Petersburg in 1991.

** Contacts at the Magic Lantern Society have expressed great surprise upon finding out that I have these professionally made slides. They are very much in touch with the market for collectible slides and told me that “while we know that a thriving Magic Lantern industry was present in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th century, no examples of work have survived.”