Picturesque

Abstract

Most middle-class Victorian parlors would have contained a stereoscope with which to view a collection of stereographic cards. When viewers peeped into the device, the stereoview’s dual photographs leapt into startling three-dimensionality, making the stereoscope the perfect vehicle for virtual travel—to everywhere from Egypt to Niagara Falls. While some have seen the stereoscope as a forebear of postmodernism, Chapter 5 instead aligns it with the picturesque, the high-art landscape aesthetic of the eighteenth century. The chapter reveals the surprising imbrication of nature, art, and technology: the picturesque was enabled by technological devices that ranged from the Claude glass to the camera obscura to the stereoscope. The stereoscope’s visual technology worked to remediate Romantic ideals: it was an organic machine and prosthesis attached to the spectator’s body that enabled an extraordinary, humanistic experience. Promoting corporeal fantasies across space and time, stereoscopy reflected an imperial power dynamics of global visual mastery.