Alexander Black

Alexander Black was an American author, photographer and newspaperman born in New York City, the eldest child of Peter Black and Sarah MacCrae, both born in Scotland. After a grammar school education and teaching himself printmaking, he began his career as a newspaperman in Brooklyn and stenographer for Brooklyn courts, alongside freelance writing and photography. In 1886 he became the first president of the department of photography at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. He 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 Eadweard Muybridge capturing the effect of motion in photography, Black began to develop a plan to bring fiction to life through dissolving slides. Over the summer of 1894, he wrote and photographed his first "Picture Play" titled Miss Jerry (1894). 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. Miss Jerry was well received at the time, and Black went on to create and tour with two more Picture Plays, A Capital Courtship (1896) and The Girl and the Guardsman (1899). In the years following the Picture Play, he went on to become a popular novelist, publishing several books into the 1930s, including adaptations of his three Picture Plays. He also continued to experiment with photography and film, creating several home made 16mm films featuring special effects and titles.