Seeing double: the body and New England mountain stereography
Date
2024
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
In the second half of the nineteenth century, a new form of media collided with landscape representation, and Americans’ relationship with the natural world would never be the same. Stereography, a form of dual-lens photography that mimicked the alignment of the human eyes, offered a radically “real” form of representation, simulating true immersion where contemporary panoramas and lantern shows had only gestured toward it. As the prying eye of the camera crept further and further into the backwoods and frontiers of the United States, a few sites of natural beauty remained unphotographed. The Maine backwoods, however, remained remote well into the nineteenth century, largely absent from the visual milieu of Victorian New England. Despite the profusion of photographs depicting Mount Washington and other notable peaks of New England, Katahdin, the tallest mountain in Maine, remained unphotographed until one intrepid photographer set out in the 1870s. ☐ In order to examine the relationship between landscape and the nineteenth-century body, this thesis takes as a case study a set of stereographic views by Maine photographer Amos Lunt Hinds, Scenery in Northern Maine (1870s). The Katahdin series offers a poignant moment to reflect on the entanglement of the body with nineteenth-century landscape stereography. Loosely following the artist’s picture series, the thesis is divided into five sections: the first, titled “The Approaches,” will consider the photographer Hinds’ physical movement through time and space to access the Maine backwoods, using Henry David Thoreau’s The Maine Woods as a model. The second section, “The Ascent,” will weigh the ideological motivations behind wilderness excursions, linking Hinds’ journey to contemporary ideas about nature and mountain-climbing. The predatory underpinnings of cultural threads prioritizing experience in nature culminate in the photographic act, examined in the third section, “The Summit.” The fourth section, “In the Lake Basin,” probes the possibilities of an ecocritical approach for nineteenth-century landscape photography, advocating for a decentering of both the representational capacity of photography and its human actors. Finally, the fifth section, “Pictures by the Way,” displaces the discussion from the great outdoors into the middle-class parlor, suggesting that the consumption of landscape imagery facilitated an imaginative occupation of the American wilderness by metropolitan viewers. In foregrounding the corporeal experiences of both makers and consumers of stereographic objects, this project interrogates how the body performs cultural work and how embodied experience intersects with cultural ideals.
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Keywords
Scenery in northern Maine, Stereography, Maine backwoods, The Ascent, Photographic act