This stereo card arguably fulfills both roles in that it aims to both memorialize the soldiers and provide an account of life in the trenches. The photograph is close enough that one can recognize individual faces, privileging rather than erasing or devaluing individual identity even as the individual forms a part of the collective (the group of soldiers). This stereograph, unlike many other images of war, depicts soldiers preparing for battle rather than a war-torn landscape or its bloody aftermath. Thus the stereograph draws attention to the war’s human cost, preserving an image of the soldiers even as it foretells their loss (the implication being that many, if not all, of them will not survive). The text on the stereo card’s back, however, is concerned with the general conditions of a soldier’s life: it references No Man’s Land, the Christmas Truce, and the Belgian population. These descriptions are abstract and lack individuality, providing an overview rather than a subjective account. This abstraction may also suggest that the author of the text was never at the front himself.
Sources and Further Reading:
Lenman, Robin. “war photography.” The Oxford Companion to the Photograph : Oxford University Press, 2005. Web. 4 Mar. 2015.
Tucker, Anne, Will Michels and Natalie Zelt. War/photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath. Houston : New Haven: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston ; distributed by Yale University Press, 2012. Print.
In the early years of the war, Britain used the Rape of Belgium for its own propaganda and political purposes. Belgium was a major keystone of British war propaganda, which characterized Britain’s entry into the war as one “to defend small, democratic, neutral countries against autocracy and its supposed by-product, militarism” (Fleming 50). However, though recent scholarship confirms the atrocities of the German occupation, Fleming notes that the “poor little Belgium” narrative is undermined by Belgium’s own atrocities in the Congo and its dubious claim to neutrality (49-50). This political narrative spurred recruitment, anti-German sentiment and attempts to persuade the then-neutral United States to join the war (45-6). Later events, such as the sinking of the Lusitania (55-56) and the Bryce report (52-55), eventually pushed the United States to declare war against Germany in 1917.
However, one cannot ignore the influence of British censorship and propaganda in these cases: Britain cut off any direct communication between Germany and the United States and censored news coming out of Berlin, ensuring that news of the war would be one-sided (44-45). Furthermore, the Bryce report contained sensationalized—and likely fabricated—accounts of German violence in addition to its more accurate descriptions (Fleming 55).
Sources and Further Reading:
Fighting Words and Images Representing War across the Disciplines. Ed. Stephan Jaeger, Elena V. Baraban, and Adam Muller. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Print.
Fleming, Thomas J. The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Print.
Kramer, Alan. Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Web. 17 Feb. 2015.
Zuckerman, Larry. The Rape of Belgium: The Untold Story of World War I. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Print.
Perhaps more interesting than the event itself is how the Christmas Truce endures in the public imagination. In wartime, news of the event was generally withheld from official accounts (Eksteins 114) and survives mostly in soldiers’ letters and diaries (95-7). War propaganda, which painted the enemy as barbarians “beyond the pale, incapable of such normal human emotions as compassion and friendship” and some people found the Truce difficult to believe (98). The stereo card certainly emphasizes its unusualness by contrasting it to the (albeit abstractly described) horrors of trench warfare.
In modern times, we memorialize—or even mythologize—the Truce for its romantic and sentimental value. The Christmas Truce has become a hopeful narrative of how peace and goodwill can triumph even in extraordinarily difficult circumstances—one blog article calls it “a Victory for Human Kindness” (Brown 1). More recently, Sainsbury’s, a British grocery store chain, dramatized the event in a Christmas ad. The ad has sparked controversy (Associated Press), with some arguing that it sanitizes the horrors of the First World War and exploits the results for profit. Thus, the issue of what narratives to tell about history, and to what ends we use them, continues to be relevant.
Sources and Further Reading:
Ashworth, Tony. Trench Warfare, 1914-1918: The Live and Let Live System. New York, N.Y: Holmes & Meier, 1980. Print.
Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. 1st ed. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1989. Print.
Sainsbury’s. “Sainsbury’s OFFICIAL Christmas 2014 Ad.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 12 Nov. 2014. 17 Feb. 2015. Available on YouTube
Sainsbury’s.”Sainsbury’s Christmas – The story behind our Christmas ad.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 12 Nov. 2014. 17 Feb. 2015. Available on YouTube
The Associated Press. “Grocery Chain’s Christmas Ad Stirs Tears, Outrage.” The New York Times 21 Nov. 2014. NYTimes.com. Web. 17 Feb. 2015. Available online
Compared to a different stereograph from the same photographer, this stereograph omits the faces of those standing around the bodies, as well the stalls and sky in the background. Where the former offered some negative space in which to let the eye rest, the latter immerses the viewer while denying any such escape. The three-dimensional effect further enhances this immersion: the way the bodies overlap (a phenomena called occlusion) heighten the illusion of depth when the stereo card is viewed in 3D (Crary 124-5). Thus, the pile of bodies would seem to to recede further and further into the distance, emphasizing their sheer scale in a way that could not be accomplished with 2D photography.
These immersive techniques, when combined with such unpleasant subject matter, seem far from the earlier understanding of stereography as a pleasing, educational, and passive artform for its audience. If the stereograph is “pleasing,” it would not be pleasure in the traditional sense, and one might question whether it would be voyeuristic or sympathetic. If the stereograph is educational, does it seek to educate viewers about a less idealistic side of humanity rather than the cultural and intellectual refinement that David Brewster envisioned? Does the stereograph promote a passive experience that preserves the boundary between viewer and the viewed, or seek to close the gap through immersion?
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1990. Print.
News coverage, both within and outside Russia, concerned itself with the question of responsibility for the event. Although coverage varied in their sympathy (or lack thereof) towards the mob, Baker writes that it was “perhaps, inevitable, in an autocratic regime, that responsibility for any popular disaster would eventually be laid at the door of the authorities that had organised it” (8). Though Western news articles were (at least initially) sympathetic towards Tzar Nicholas II, emphasizing his sorrow and subsequent charitable actions (Sydney Herald; Baker 23), Baker reveals that the Khodynka tragedy and its aftermath shook Russian confidence in royal authority and “provoked the first strains of popular hostility towards Nicholas II” (38-39). Though Nicholas made hospital rounds and attended a special mourning service, he did not cancel his appearance at a ball later that evening — a decision that caused some controversy—though several accounts note that he looked uncomfortable throughout the event (16-19). Some critics and historians interpret this decision as an attempt to appease his family and the foreign dignitaries that had travelled long distances to celebrate his coronation (Baker 19-21; Warth 27-28). The coronation celebration, intended to be “an emblem of future prosperity” (Baker 2), cast a shadow on Nicholas’s reign and remains one of its most memorable events—especially considering his eventual forced abdication and execution following the Russian Revolution.
Sources and Further Reading:
“THE MOSCOW DISASTER. PANIC AT THE FETES. THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE TRAMPLED TO DEATH. TERRIBLE SCENES. [BY TELEGRAPH.] (FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT.) ALBANY, Saturday.” The Sydney Morning Herald 6 July 1896: 5. Web. Available online.
Baker, Helen. “Monarchy Discredited? Reactions to the Khodynka Coronation Catastrophe of 1896.” 16.1 (2003): 1–46. Web. Available online.
Warth, Robert D. Nicholas II: The Life and Reign of Russia’s Last Monarch. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1997. Print.
The Johnstown Flood became an event of great national interest. McCullough describes how the Pittsburgh Gazette “was selling its editions so fast that it had to reduce its page size temporarily so as not to run out of paper. Everywhere, people were talking of little else” (204). The coverage was not always factually accurate; for example, the reported death toll initially varied between 100 and 10 000, despite there being “no firsthand facts to go on” at the time (203). Though the inaccuracies were partly due to the difficulty of discerning truth in a disaster’s aftermath, they were also influenced by commercial or political motivations or biases. Many sensational stories emphasized the horror and contained “distortions, wild exaggerations and outright nonsense” (220). These stories seem exploitative in their desire to titillate or entertain rather than inform.
Nevertheless, if an emotional response was the ultimate goal, there may also have been more positive consequences. Johnstown benefited from many charitable donations and was also the first real test of the American Red Cross (229-231). Such stories created villains as well: many of the papers (perhaps rightly) blamed the South Forks Fishing Club, whose millionaire members built the dam for their private resort with perhaps less than stringent standards (246-8). Several papers also described “Huns” (East European immigrants) who stole jewellery off flood victims—anecdotes that were racially prejudiced and untrue (210-212).
Sources and Further Reading:
Allen, Jean. “Remembering Johnstown’s Flood Victims.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 2 Jun. 2002: E2. ProQuest. Web. 5 Jan. 2015.
“Johnstown Marks Flood Centennial: City Leaders Say Anniversary Is a Time to Take Pride in Overcoming Adversity.” New York Times 1 Jun. 1989: A18. ProQuest. Web. 5 Jan 2015.
McCullough, David G. The Johnstown Flood. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968. Print.
Walker, James H. The Johnstown Horror!!! or Valley of Death. Philadelphia: National Publishing Company, 1889. Print. Available on Project Gutenberg
Though Fyfe aligns photography with the slow demise of the catastrophic picturesque (79-80), this stereograph shares some of the same visual characteristics and can be seen as a transitional piece. Several different forms of photography and illustration were popular and co-existed during the 19 th century, such that it is perhaps more useful to think of the period in terms of multiple “photographies” or illustrative techniques rather than in monolithic terms (Clayton 12-22). It is unsurprising that visual media might borrow or appropriate visual techniques from other genres.
The stereograph, for example, was taken from a high vantage point that allows the viewer to survey the damage below—a characteristic that the catastrophic picturesque used to “encourage [viewers] to see illustrations as aesthetic objects, and to examine illustrations of disasters from a safe, contemplative remove” (Fyfe 79-80). Furthermore, if the “blend of scenery and wreckage” characterizes the catastrophic picturesque (Fyfe 81), then the wreckage in this stereograph becomes the scenery. Broken, jumbled, and splintered pieces of wood—alienated from the recognizable objects they once were—are what form the “landscape.” Lastly, Fyfe describes the catastrophic picturesque as a way to reconstruct or even replace the accident as experience (79). Since the picturesque “offer[s] pictures in place if the ‘experience’ they claimed to deliver,” then stereography—whose champions exploited its 3D effect for their experiential claims—is an especially fitting medium for this visual genre.
Sources and Further Reading:
Clayton, Owen. Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850-1915. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.Print.
Fyfe, Paul. “Illustrating the Accident: Railways and the Catastrophic Picturesque in The Illustrated London News.” Victorian Periodicals Review. 46.1 (2013): 61–91. Project MUSE. Web. 20 Feb. 2015. Available online
New York City’s elevated railway (or “el train”) was a response to congestion and sanitation problems caused by horse-drawn street transportation. Social reformers, such as Dr. Rufus Gilbert, hoped the elevated railway would also relieve extreme overcrowding and poor living conditions in Manhattan’s downtown by allowing the poor to move to more sanitary, less populated areas while still being able to travel to work (Derrick 10-22). The first elevated railway opened to passengers in Manhattan the late 1860s and the system expanded northwards throughout the 1870s (Roess and Sansonne 104-109). The el train allowed middle-class and some working-class New Yorkers to move northwards into less crowded real estate. But despite reformers’ hopes, land expansion and development was not enough to keep pace with New York’s rapidly growing population (Derrick 22), which more than doubled from 1870-1900 (10). New tenements simply sprang up further north (Roess and Sansonne 134) or even clustered around the elevated railway lines (Derrick 32).
In popular visual representation, the railway is often a key component of the “industrial picturesque”—an aesthetic genre that focused on the railway’s “most placid moments and idealized features” (Fyfe 61-2). As an example of this genre, this stereograph uses the straight, receding diagonal lines of the train tracks for both stability in their regularity, as well as dynamism or sense of movement that “underlines the intrinsic power and excitement associated with the railroad itself” (Lyden 47). However, it is also worth noting that the railway in this case is tied to an urban, metropolitan setting while many of the examples that Fyfe cites are not.
In William Dean Howells’ novel, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), Basil March, a middle-class literary journalist, takes the 3rd Ave El train down Bowery Street (pictured in the stereograph). He describes the working-class immigrants in the car with him as “unfailingly entertaining as ever”(Howells 182). Like the flâneur, March objectifies the people he sees, eschewing “who and what they individually were” in favour of the physical characteristics he finds so aesthetically pleasing (183). March’s elevated train ride is both a scene of social contact and self-gratifying spectacle as he inspects “the gay ugliness—the shapeless, graceless, reckless picturesqueness of the Bowery” (183). For March, the roughness of the urban crowd does not disrupt or defy the picturesque; rather, they are absorbed and totalized into an ultimately pleasing picture.
Sources and Further Reading:
Derrick, Peter. “Never Enough: The Beginnings of Rapid Transit in New York.” Tunneling to the Future: The Story of the Great Subway Expansion That Saved New York. New York: New York University Press, 2001. 9-46. Print. 5 Nov. 2014.
Fyfe, Paul. “Illustrating the Accident: Railways and the Catastrophic Picturesque in The Illustrated London News.” Victorian Periodicals Review 46.1 (2013): 61-86. Web. 20 Feb. 2015.
Howells, William D. A Hazard of New Fortunes. New York: Modern Library, 2002. Print. Available on Project Gutenberg
Lyden, Anne M. Railroad Vision: Photography, Travel, and Perception. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003. Print.
Roess, Roger P., and Gene Sansone. “To ‘El’ and Back: The Era of the Elevated Railroad.”The Wheels That Drove New York: A History of the New York City Transit System. Berlin: Springer, 2013. 89-138. Web. 5 Nov. 2014.
In “The Stereoscope and the Miniature,” Pietrobruno argues that stereographs of New York City portrayed the metropolis as “the heart of modern progress and civilization” (181). Many of the features she describes appear in this stereograph. For example, the street “extends to infinity” in the background, making the city appear limitless in power and potential (181). The stereograph celebrates urban technological innovations (e.g. the elevated train and streetcars) as symbols of modernity and progress (183). Taken above street level, the stereograph also promotes an orderly view of the city (182) that omits the problems of overcrowding, poverty, and crime that prevailed in the infamous Bowery District and Five Points slums mere steps away. Furthermore, the photographer took this photograph from the railway platform—thus, industry literally elevates him above those he does and does not choose to photograph.
Bowery Street was “noted” for being the site of poverty, crime, disease, and prostitution. The surrounding area was densely populated—for example, Ward 10, extending just east of Bowery Street, had a population density of 347,749 in 1890 and 433,986 in 1900 (Gardner n.p.). The tenements, low-income housing where almost all of these people lived, were overcrowded, filthy, frequently flooded and poorly-ventilated (Riis 11-12). Deadly disease outbreaks (especially cholera) and fires spread rapidly through the cramped wooden buildings.
Jacob Riis, a social reformer, used photography in How the Other Half Lives (1890) to expose the New York slums and convince authorities and the public of the need for reform. Photography, as a relatively new and realist mode, was inherent to his reformist intentions: writing, he said, “[made] no impression” and drawing “would not have been evidence of the kind I wanted” (Riis 267). Realist photography, by contrast, confronted—and, no doubt, shocked—his middle- and upper-class audiences with the ugly truth. Critics have since questioned whether his photography and writing might have, intentionally or not, encouraged a sense of spectacle or titillation. Nevertheless, Riis’s photography is an interesting counterpoint to the sanitized, touristic view of this stereograph, which is motivated by commercial interests of tourism and marketability rather than a desire for reform.
Sources and Further Reading:
Gardner, Todd. “New York (Manhattan) Wards: Population & Density 1800-1910.” Demographia.com. Demographia, n.d. Web. 13 Nov 2014. Available online
Pietrobruno, Sheenagh. “The stereoscope and the miniature.” Early Popular Visual Culture 9.3 (2011): 171-190. Web. 13 Nov 2014.
Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives. New York: Penguin Books, 1997. Print.
Riis, Jacob. The Making of an American. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1901. Print.
Though Strain discusses photography of Indigenous peoples on the periphery or even outside of the Empire proper, much of her essay still applies to this representation of an Irish couple. Ireland displayed characteristics of a colony in their economic relationship (Ryder 166) and through representation. Strain notes how photographers began to contextualize their subjects “within a lush, natural environment with crudelybuilt shelters” as a way to suppress signs of colonial contact (91-92). One can clearly see these aspects in the stereograph’s rural features, such as the thatched roof and the farm animals. These features depict the Irish as untouched by signs of industrialization or commerce, separating it from the rational, industrialized Imperial centre.
In her essay on (English and Irish) national character, Cullingford discusses how the Irish, because of their skin colour, became a “disturbing mixture of sameness and difference, [of] geographical closeness and cultural distance” to the English (287). English dramatists therefore emphasized characteristics that “signaled political incompetence” in their representations of Irishmen (287). Thus, even as such representations romanticized the rural Irish, they also became “justification” for Irish inferiority and paternalistic Imperial attitudes towards the Irish (287-8). The text on the back of the card signals the couple’s political incompetence through their economic status and illiteracy (notably, these are metrics of capitalism and education established and promoted by the English Imperial centre). For example, the stereo card emphasizes the “unlettered” couple’s constant “fight with poverty.” Their lack of wealth and education render them politically impotent and therefore, in Imperialist thinking, in need of Empire rather than a threat to it.
Sources and Further Reading:
Cullingford, Elizabeth B. “National Identities in Performance: The Stage Englishman of Boucicault’s Irish Drama.” Theatre Journal 49.3 (1997)
287-300. Web. Available online
Ryder, Sean. “Defining Colony and Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century Irish Nationalism.” Was Ireland A Colony? Economics, Politics and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. Ed. Terrence McDonough. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005. Print.
Strain, Ellen. “Exotic Bodies, Distant Landscapes.” Wide Angle 18.2 (1996) 70-100. Web. Available online
“If you would like to see the height of hospitality,
The cream of kindly welcome and the core of cordiality;
Joys of old times are you wishing to recall again,
Oh, come down to Donovan’s and there you’ll meet them all again.
Soon as you lift the latch, little ones are meeting you;
Soon as you’re ‘neath the thatch, kindly looks are greeting you;
Scarce have you time to be holding out the fist to them—
Down by the fireside you’re sitting in the midst of them.”
Read Stephen Gwynn: Highways and Byways in Donegal and Antrim; W. M. Thackeray: Irish Sketchbook; Samuel Lover’s Poems and Songs; Kate Douglas Wiggin: Penelope’s Irish Experiences. Read the short stories of Jane Barlow.
“A Fine Day, Sir, and Welcome”: a Hospitable Home in Ireland
[translations into other languages]
Further Reading:
McAuliffe, John. “Taking the Sting out of the Traveller’s Tale: Thackeray’s Irish Sketchbook.” Irish Studies Review 9(1) 25-40. Web. 27 Nov. 2014.
Dictionary of Irish Biography. ed. James McGuire and James Quinn. Web. 27 Nov. 2014.
nicoley133. “Bing sings ‘The Donovans.'” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 7 Oct. 2011. Web. 27 Nov. 2014. Available on YouTube.
The picturesque also contains political or imperialist overtones. As an ideal, the picturesque is a highly subjective experience and therefore privileges the viewer above all else—it centres on the viewer’s pleasure and stimulating his or her imagination. As Andrews notes, tourists of the picturesque often acted like “big-game hunters,” boasting about “‘capturing’ wild scenes, and ‘fixing’ them as pictorial trophies in order to sell them or hang them up in frames” (Andrews qtd. in Hooper 176). In an imperialist context, the picturesque—like the big-game hunter who encounters and conquers savage landscapes—implies objectification, appropriation and ownership of Irish land or peoples. The picturesque’s subjective nature also privileges the viewer’s (read: colonizer’s) impression of a landscape or people over other perspectives.
For example, the narrative on the back of the stereograph omits, simplifies or even romanticizes the political, social and economic reality of Ireland at the time. For example, the travel guide mentions the couple’s “fight with poverty” and “worries and sorrows, not a few.” This could be a reference to recurring famines or agricultural depression that sparked the Land War, a period of civil unrest and clashes between land owners and tenants in the late 19 th century (Adelman and Pearce 79-84). However, their troubles are simplified and offered as a reason that their “cheery” “Irish temperament” is all the more admirable. This is similar to Alfred Austin’s narrative of his Irish travels, which offered a “sheltered image” of Ireland that painted a “benign” picture of its inhabitants (Hooper 184). Austin describes the Irish as hospitable and patient, similar to the stereo card’s narrative of Ireland as “the height of hospitality” and “cream of kindly welcome.” However, this benign picture would not last: nationalist sentiment grew during the turn of the 20th century, erupting violently during the Easter Rising (1916) and subsequent partition and civil war (Austin 185).
Sources and Further Reading:
Adelman, Paul and Robert Pearce. Great Britain and the Irish Question 1800-1922. 2nd ed. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2001. Print.
Hooper, Glenn. “The Isles/Ireland: the wilder shore.” The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Print.
Thompson, Spurgeon. “Famine Travel: Irish Tourism from the Great Famine to Decolonization.” Travel Writing and Tourism in Britain and Ireland. 164-180.Travel Writing and Tourism in Britain and Ireland. Ed. Benjamin Colbert. Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmilan, 2012. Print.
Williams, William H. A. “The Irish Tour, 1800-1850.” Travel Writing and Tourism in Britain and Ireland.
Stereophotography, or stereography, takes this realism one step further by providing a three-dimensional image rather than a two-dimensional one. 19th century writer, David Brewster, continually refers to stereography as a more truthful and accurate medium than writing or drawing. He advocates stereography’s application to scientific study and education, arguing “[a teacher] may pour it in by the ear, or extract it from the printed page or exhibit it in caricature…but unless he teaches through the eye…by means of truthful pictures…no satisfactory instruction can be conveyed”(Brewster 195). However, scientists also recognized that this claim is somewhat paradoxical: in order to access “the truth,” one must first, by looking through the stereoscope, manipulate the eyes in order to see it.
The photograph as an absolute, objective record is problematic. Photography in the 19th century appeared to be a relatively passive medium and this concept fed into an assumption of complete objectivity (Wilder 19). But practical concerns such as differences in technique (e.g. emulsions, exposure) and environment (e.g. weather, heat, dryness) prevented the consistently repeatable results so important to scientific method (19-21). Secondly, the photographer’s motivations ultimately determine what is included or excluded from the frame. As photography, and stereography, begin to interact with both scientific and commercial interests, we might also ask how different motivations inform the particular version of “the truth” presented.
Sources and Further Reading:
Brewster, David. The Stereoscope; its history, theory, and construction, with its application to the fine and useful arts and to education. London: Hotten, 1870.
Tucker, Jennifer. Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005. Print.
Wilder, Kelley. Photography and Science. London: Reaktion Books, 2009. Print.
Though we might consider them separate professions today, scientists in the 19th century were often photographers or inventors as well. Henry Draper, who likely took the photographs that make up this stereograph, developed his own telescope with which he took photographs of the moon in the 1860s and 1870s (Barker 92-94). Although his lunar photographs were likely not intended to be stereographs, Draper may have given permission for the publisher, Charles Bierstadt, to use them for commercial purposes like his father, J. W. Draper, once did (Darrah 147). The photographs that make up this stereograph were likely taken hours apart. That way, the Earth’s rotation would carry the telescope and camera far enough away that the two images would show the displacement necessary to the stereograph’s 3D effect (Whiting n.p.).
The relationship between 19th century scientific rhetoric and commercial rhetoric also carries implications for the stereograph’s claims to truthfulness. In New Media, 1740-1915, Schiavo argues that scientific rhetoric recognized that the stereoscope, by manipulating viewers into seeing a 3D image that was not actually there, raised “fundamental questions about the status and reliability of vision” (114-116). But stereo card sellers marketed the stereoscope as a scientific tool that popular audiences could use to comprehend and appreciate human vision and vaguely alluded to science as authority without considering its actual scientific complexities or consequences (Schiavo 125-126). Thus, the layman encountered stereography as a commodified and “faithful image of human perception” (126).
Sources and Further Reading:
Barker, George F. Memoir of Henry Draper 1837-1882. 1888. The National Academy of Sciences. Web. 13 Nov 2014. Available online
Darrah, WIlliam. The World of Stereographs. Gettysburg: William C. Darrah, 1977.
Schiavo, Laura B. “From Phantom Image to Perfect Vision: Physiological Optics, Commercial Photography, and the Popularity of the Stereoscope.”New Media, 1740-1915. ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree. Cambridge, Massachussetts: MIT Press, 2003. Print.
Wilder, Kelley. Photography and Science. London: Reaktion Books, 2009. Print.
Whiting, Alan. Email correspondence, forwarded by Prof. Scott-Morgan Straker. 16 Jan. 2015.
Thus, this stereograph of the moon can be seen as a way to “travel” to the moon about a hundred years before the lunar landing. This view of the moon, as a stereo card, would have been easily portable, sellable, and consumable. In this way, we—as well as 19th-century users at the time—might see stereography as empowering and a symbol of humanity’s mastery of nature via technology. But such a vision has its costs: Schiavo notes that, through marketing and commodification, stereography loses its roots in scientific inquiry (121-5). Instead, its relation to science was vaguely described and largely exploited as a selling point without any explanation of its scientific process or implications (127).
Furthermore, Crary describes how users themselves become part of the “optical device” since stereoscopy relies on the binocular vision and mental processes of the person looking (131-2). Drawing on Marx, Crary contends that the “machine makes use of man by subjecting him to a relation of contiguity, of parts to otherparts, and of exchangeability” (131). During the rise of the industrial age, Victorian users were both anxious about and fascinated by the increasingly blurred lines between humans, commodities, and machines — an ambivalence that persists in our modern-day computer age.
Sources and Further Reading:
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1990. Print.
Marx, Karl. “Economic Manuscripts: Grundrisse: p 501 – p 550.” Marxists Internet Archive. Marxists.org, n.d. Web. 19 Feb. 2015. Available online
Natale, Simone. “Photography and Communication Media in the Nineteenth Century.” History of Photography. 36.4 (2012): 451–456. Web. 20 Feb. 2015.
Schiavo, Laura Burd. “From Phantom Image to Perfect Vision: Physiological Optics, Commercial Photography, and the Popularity of the Stereoscope.”New Media, 1740-1915. ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree. Cambridge, Massachussetts: MIT Press, 2003. Print.
Although this stereograph may share some aspects of social documentary photography, it does not fit neatly into this category. The stereograph is certainly concerned with the social cost of the disaster: Barker deems the event a “calamity” rather than simply a “flood” and includes human figures in the act of searching for bodies. However, the stereograph is also concerned with nature’s power. It was taken from a relatively high angle and emphasizes the sheer scale of the destruction that dwarves the humans pictured rather than overtly focus on the people themselves. Moreover, it would be difficult to argue the stereograph is committed to humanistic values or that it calls for action—two hallmarks of social documentary photography. It is difficult to speculate about the intent or approach of the photographer. As Rosenblum notes, “in themselves images could not necessarily be counted on to convey specific meanings…how they were perceived often depended on the outlook and social bias of the viewer” (353). As with all media, it is ultimately reductive to ascribe a singular purpose to a work of art at the exclusion of others. But the questions such photographs raised in the 19th century about how documentary purposes, Art or aesthetic ideals, and ethics intersect still persist today.
Sources and Further Reading:
Lindsay, David. “The Kodak Camera Starts a Craze.” PBS.org, n.d. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Web. 5 Jan. 2015. Available online
Newhall, Beaumont. “Documentary Approach to Photography.” Parnassus 10.3 (1938): 3–6. JSTOR. Web. 3 Jan. 2015. Available on JSTOR
Rosenblum, Naomi. A World History of Photography. 4th ed. New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 2007. Print.