Early Garden Photography: Glass Lantern Slides with Joyce Connolly

Garden photography hasn’t always been as easy as point-and-shoot on your cell phone. Learn about the one-of-a-kind hand-tinted glass lantern slides that were crafted a century ago to document gardens and tell their stories. These fragile lantern slides—the PowerPoint presentations of their day—were used to educate audiences about garden history and design.

Bio: Joyce Connolly has been a museum specialist with Smithsonian Gardens’ Collections, Education, and Access branch since 1999. She helps manage the Archives of American Gardens (AAG), a repository that collects and preserves documentation relating to thousands of historic and contemporary gardens across the US. This documentation is used by writers, scholars, preservationists, and others to tell stories about the natural and built environments, horticulture, plants, history, art, science, design, and culture. Prior to joining the Smithsonian, she was an archives specialist at the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site in Brookline, MA, for several years.