Picturing the Nation

Photography and National Identity in the Nineteenth Century

by Dr. Laura Schiavo

November 2009

According to an 1873 review of a set of stereographs, "A family around a table, with maps and stereoscopic views, locating and seeing the places, form[s] a scene worthy of the artist's pencil. [It is] a true way to lead your children to Geography and History." Stereographs were immensely popular from their introduction in the 1850s well into the twentieth century. This was also a period of tremendous growth for the United States, marked by expansion across the continent, broadened political control in new territories formerly colonized by the European powers and Mexico, and the confiscation of Native American lands. As suggested by the quotation above, stereographs were considered a useful—even ideal—tool to familiarize Americans with the vast regions and once-foreign locales being domesticated by their incorporation into the United States.

Although stereoscopic views pictured a range of subjects from literary vignettes to floral arrangements, Anthony's Photographic Bulletin in 1871 characterized the growing demand for stereographs—"chiefly, of course, for American scenery." "Scenery" included not only landscape views of the magnificent valleys, waterfalls, and mountains critical to the depiction of the expanding nation, but also images of the built environment, including buildings of significance in US history, landscaped parks, cityscapes and streetscapes, and advances in infrastructure—such as dams and railroads—all of which served as potent indicators of the nation's progress. The American Journal of Photography editorialized in 1858, "It is a good sign that the taste [for stereoscopic images] has commenced in the right direction—Landscape, Architecture, and Composition." When Oliver Wendell Holmes commended stereographs for their excellence of representation, he specifically called out the "scenery" and "architectural objects." According to the text on one stereograph, the stereoscopic camera "copies the beautiful in Architecture and Landscape in all its sweet gradations, harmonies and contrasts."

The formal characteristics of stereographs made them particularly effective transmitters of pictorial information. Stereographs presented views in three dimensions, thus affording a more life-like image than other printed media. Based on the physiological phenomenon of binocular vision, whereby the brain merges the single images received in both eyes into one three-dimensional view, stereographs are composed of a pair of photographs—identical but for a slight difference in perspective—mounted on a card roughly two inches apart. The lenses of the stereoscope, the instrument through which the stereograph is viewed, mimic the physiology of the eyes and make the two images appear as a three-dimensional view. Such views engendered a sense of being present at the site depicted, a feeling described time and again in the contemporary literature. Photographer Robert Hunt wrote in the Art Journal in 1856 that the stereoscope enables the viewer to "see things as they are in nature." In a series of articles about the stereoscope, Oliver Wendell Holmes described an experiment that proved the instrument's ability to present an equivalent view. Using the example of a Cambridge, Massachusetts, cityscape, he wrote:

We had a stereoscopic view taken by Mr. Soule out of our parlor window, overlooking the town of Cambridge, with the river and the bridge in the foreground. Now, placing this view in the stereoscope, and looking with the left eye at the right stereographic picture, while the right eye looked at the natural landscape, through the window where the view was taken, it was not difficult to adjust the photographic and real views that one overlapped the other, and then it was shown that the two almost exactly coincided in all their dimensions.

Finished bridge from mouth of Dix River Courtesy Photographic Archives, Ekstrom Library, University of Louisville

The relative convenience of the equipment used to take stereographs (compared to that required for large-plate photographs) made them the format of choice for many photographers, especially those who traveled. In addition, publishing stereographs which could combine text and images was faster and simpler than printing photographically-illustrated publications. It was not until the 1880s, with the integration of the halftone process by the publishing industry, that photographs could be printed alongside text without the intermediate step of converting the photograph into an engraving. (The process, which represents photographic images as a series of dots rather than in a continuous tone, allows photographs to be printed with only one color and therefore be compatible with the printing of text.)

Hence, there were a multitude of views of locations across the country in stereographic format, creating a far more comprehensive geographic spread than that offered by other photographic media.

Although photographers in Philadelphia and New York dominated early stereograph production, by the 1860s stereo-photographers—most of whom produced views of cities, towns, and landscapes—operated out of most states and territories in the West, Southwest, Midwest, and, to a more limited extent, the Pacific Northwest and the South. For example, photographer Charles Savage, who sold his views at a gallery in Salt Lake City, published a series entitled "Photographic Scenes in Utah, Arizona, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming Territories" in the 1860s and ’70s. Stereographs became the most affordable and accessible medium by which Americans could educate themselves about the swiftly changing nation. In a travel guide by Samuel Kneeland published in Boston in 1871, the author, referring to Yosemite Valley, contends that "[e]xcellent photographs for stereoscopic use have rendered these scenes familiar to many."

The E. and H. T. Anthony Company was one the largest retailers of photographs from the late 1850s through the 1870s. The views in its popular series included series depicting Yosemite Valley, Mammoth Cave, Niagara Falls, and the Pacific Railroad—a list illustrative of the combination of the natural and the built environment in the picturing of the nation. In depicting his native New Hampshire in an 1870s series entitled "Stereoscopic Treasures," F.G. Weller included, in addition to natural formations in the White Mountains and across the state, streetscapes, houses, hotels, industrial views, bridges, railroad trestlework and rail depots, and lumber mills. The seminal importance of infrastructural developments to the perceived progress of the nation is perhaps best exemplified by the predominance of images of railroads, where human improvements traced the country's natural beauty. The Langenheim Brothers, who published some of the earliest stereographs, included among their 1855 offerings views along the route from Philadelphia to Niagara Falls following the Reading, Catawissa, Williamsport, and Elmira Railroads. In the 1860s and ‘70s many of the same photographers who worked for the western geological surveys either documented the spread of the railroads as part of the expeditions, were employed by the railroads, or produced railroad images as independent ventures. Stereo-photographer A.A. Hart, the first official photographer of the Central Pacific Railroad, helped launch the western tourist industry in 1865 by publishing maps of the railroad and 400 stereoscopic views documenting the building of the Central Pacific all the way to the driving of the spike at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869. Photographer A.R. Russell's railroad views were promoted as follows: "Miss not the opportunity for getting a proper conception of this great national work and the marvelous region through which it passes…."

The development of the railroad further consolidated the continent both politically and culturally and unified the West and East with the spread of goods and commerce. The railroad also became an important part of the burgeoning tourist industry, arriving in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, for example, in the 1840s. In the decades before the introduction of amateur, snapshot photography, photographers, most working in the stereo format, strategically inserted themselves into the tourism industry. A symbiotic relationship among hotels, railroads, and stereo-photography was cultivated by all three industries. Hotels built railroad stations; arrangements were made by publishers of stereographs to obtain views along the railroads; and railroad companies built hotels and printed maps, guidebooks, and collections of scenic photos, including stereographs. For example, photographer A. C. McIntyre set up an establishment at the Thousand Island House in Alexandria Bay, New York, in the 1870s and listed information about railroad excursions on the back of his stereographs.

These developments coincided with the codification of practices and norms of landscape appreciation that had emerged along with an increase in travel to sites of natural beauty in the United States in the 1820s and ’30s.

In the new language of landscape appreciation, it became necessary not only to look at the right site, but also to approach these spots from the right angle in order to experience the most moving and morally uplifting viewing experience. Guidebooks emphatically focused on obtaining the correct perspective for what became known as the "best general view." They warned that rushing around from spot to spot in search of that view was a time-consuming project that left little time for the sustained looking and concentrated gaze that landscape appreciation required. Stereographs were uniquely suited to codifying these specific viewing experiences. Looking through the stereoscope replicated the sense not only of seeing a particular location but of surveying from a particular spot, either as a substitute experience for those who could not travel, or as a re-created experience for the past traveler.

Spectacular natural sites such as Niagara Falls, the White Mountains, and Yosemite Valley were divided into digestible parts—"views"—by guidebooks which indicated lookout points, hotels, and towers from which the natural beauty could best be consumed. One view of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, scenery was informatively titled "Panoramic view from cupola [of] Theological Seminary, looking south-east to National Cemetery" (W. H. Tipton, Catalogue of Stereoscopic Views, page 9). These human-made structures optimized the views of the natural world and were considered fundamental to their appreciation. Photographers often looked at, not just from, the hotels, including locations such as Lafayette House in New Hampshire's Franconia Notch, Tip Top House in the White Mountains, and Cliff House in California. The text on stereograph cards confirmed or emphasized the significance of the viewing platform. According to the text of one stereograph, "From the top of this tower a magnificent scene is presented to the eye of the spectator—a panorama of the Niagara wonders, the like of which can be seen from no other point." In the case of one view of Niagara Falls by the Anthony Company entitled "Suspension Bridge from the landing place of the Maid of the Mist," the viewpoint and the view are both built structures. The architecture of tourism—hotels, lookout points, and towers—became as central to the appreciation of the landscape as the landscape itself.

By the late 1850s, stereographs were often organized in series with titles like "Gems of American Scenery," "American Views," "America Illustrated," and "Descriptive Views of the American Continent." A brief title printed under the image named the site; these titles then appeared on the series lists on the reverse side of the mount with the title of the pictured image often underlined. Thus, images of the "new" United States in the Midwest and the West such as the Wisconsin Dells, Yosemite, or the Mammoth Trees of California, were granted equivalent standing with eastern images of Niagara Falls, New Hampshire's White Mountains, and architectural sites of national significance in the nation's early history in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. At the same time, examples of the built environment—developments in infrastructure and architectural landmarks—were listed alongside the natural wonders that staked claim to the exceptionalism of the new American continent. By virtue of their integration in a series, scenes across the continent, including views in cities often mentioned only in regional publications, were coded as fundamentally American and marked as part of a larger, national whole.

Any nation, by its nature, is too vast for a single citizen to witness or understand fully. A sense of a nation, especially one in a state of flux as the United States was in the second half of the nineteenth century, is cultivated through cultural practices—from the singing of national anthems to the consumption of guidebooks and newspapers. Such productions do not make manifest a coherent political or geographical entity. Rather, they help bring the nation into being beyond its political—and experientially unfathomable—status. They are the constant reminders of a given place as a meaningful entity. They are as necessary to the experience of nation as the treaties and wars that create it. In the second half of the nineteenth century, stereoscopic views of the United States worked in just this way. They introduced, and familiarized Americans with, an array of images organized into comprehensible clusters, in which elements of nature and the built environment were offered as signifiers of the United States of America as a knowable place.

Dr. Schiavo was until recently a curator at the National Building Museum. She is now assistant professor in the Museum Studies Program at The George Washington University. She continues to work with the Museum on a consulting basis.

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