Multimodality has in the last couple of decades been recognized as the new norm of the digital age. The term has broadly come to stand for how image, text, moving image, and so on, interact on the digital screen. This article investigates a media-historical practice of image projections before digital media, lantern lectures, in which still images were intermixed with texts of different kinds as well as with light, sequence and scale operations. The objective is to use the media-historical case of the lantern lectures to shed light on pictorial multimodality avant la lettre in order to discuss what this implies for our knowledge position towards the multimodal norm of the present. Additionally, the study’s focus on pictorial multimodality continues the analysis in the field of image studies of what an image is and develops a discussion about the transgressive relation between pictures and the concepts used to denote them.

Metareference is a medial and semiotic phenomenon that occurs whenever a media product directs attention to its own medial and representational qualities. Usually associated with postmodern art and culture, metareference operates in the margins of media history. This chapter therefore makes a point of examining its presence in the nineteenth-century pictorial press, represented by the Swedish journal Ny Illustrerad Tidning (1865–1900). Here, metareference appears in the form of pictorialized letters, pictures within pictures, and textual elements that are neither inscriptions nor part of the depiction, but are nonetheless integral to pictorial representation. In this capacity, the Swedish journal is like its European and North American counterparts, which were all part of a media culture where the illustrated press boomed. The chapter aims to study how metareference in this context builds on what is introduced as the picture’s inherent, both formal and historical, intermediality. Proceeding from the closely connected fields of intermedial studies, word and image studies, and media history, the chapter demonstrates how metareference is dependent on a web of intermedial relations that tie together media products, mediating practices, and media concepts in the broader nineteenth-century media culture and how metareferential explicitness and implicitness results from such meaning-making, historical as well as formal, intermedial relations. Ultimately, and beyond the media culture of the nineteenth century, the chapter’s metareferential examples are highlighted as tools to reexamine past and present historiographically established discourses on media, mediation, and representation.