258
cardboard images in English and Russian. They commend, at one point, the fact that
“The cliffs and cascades are to this day thick with old Indian legends, and traditions
learned from the savage people who used to roam these mountain sides….” What
are we to make of the few pictured strangers—riding mules, lounging beside violent
cascades, or—gazes half-askance—floating aimlessly into an oblivion we envy?
Unknown souls, all deceased we can be certain, who once ventured there and asked
of the moment, and posterity in its wake, to simply leave them be, discretely captured in a mode new to American outdoor sensibility—the “sweetheart stereoviewer”
first introduced to the public in 1851.
19
The Lawrence & Houseworth stereographs
and those by Carleton Watkins (1829–1916)
20
also encompassed three-dimensional
portraiture of Native Americans, a technique first employed by Sir Charles
Wheatstone in 1838.
21
By the time Edward Sheriff Curtis, commencing in 1906
with J. P. Morgan funding, began a 20-year odyssey to photograph some 80 “tribes”
west of the Mississippi, the 20-volume masterpiece initially entitled “The Vanishing
Race,” then changed to The North American Indian, the technological frenzy to
capture images was to transform ecology.
22
27.4 Psychic Divides
The lessons learnt were built into a monumental psychic divide. There was the
aggressive will to power; to achieve acute detail in natural history, but also mythopoetic recollections of that indefinable line between art and science. This latter
motivation, that being-within-being wanting badly to confront the other, had captured the artistic prayers levied by the world’s public in country after country. Such
vanishing points, species, peoples, and feelings were paramount in an era where
technology had captured a bias flawed by its mass marketing, manipulations, advertising, and no thought of what all these hundreds of millions of photographs might
be doing to the fragile relations between humanity and nature, keeping in mind the
mixed adage that familiarity may breed love affairs, or accelerate an indifference to
multiplicities all proffering the same thing, as destruction proceeded apace.
The photographic suasion had catapulted the picture of a landscape behind a
Burgundian chateau in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, and his heliogravure of a
man leading a horse a year earlier, thought to be the oldest known photograph;
23
“of
19 https://www.nps.gov/yose/blogs/curious-matters-where-two-become-one.htm, Accessed March
12, 2020.
20 See https://www.donaldheald.com/pages/books/27829/carleton-e-watkins-photographer/collec
tion-of-56-stereoscopic-photographic-views-from-watkins-pacific-coast-series-principally
21 See “The California Indian in Three-Dimensional Photography,” by Peter E. Palmquist, Journal
of California and Great Basin Anthropology, Vol. 1, No. 1, Summer 1979, pp. 89–116, published
by Malki Museum, Inc., https://hstor.org/stable/27824948
22 See Edward S. Curtis: One Hundred Masterworks, curated by Christopher Cardozo, 2015.
23 World’s Oldest Photo Sold to Library,” March 21, 2002 BBC News n.a. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/
hi/europe/1885093.stm
27 The Metaphysics of Photography
cardboard images in English and Russian. They commend, at one point, the fact that
“The cliffs and cascades are to this day thick with old Indian legends, and traditions
learned from the savage people who used to roam these mountain sides….” What
are we to make of the few pictured strangers—riding mules, lounging beside violent
cascades, or—gazes half-askance—floating aimlessly into an oblivion we envy?
Unknown souls, all deceased we can be certain, who once ventured there and asked
of the moment, and posterity in its wake, to simply leave them be, discretely captured in a mode new to American outdoor sensibility—the “sweetheart stereoviewer”
first introduced to the public in 1851.
19
The Lawrence & Houseworth stereographs
and those by Carleton Watkins (1829–1916)
20
also encompassed three-dimensional
portraiture of Native Americans, a technique first employed by Sir Charles
Wheatstone in 1838.
21
By the time Edward Sheriff Curtis, commencing in 1906
with J. P. Morgan funding, began a 20-year odyssey to photograph some 80 “tribes”
west of the Mississippi, the 20-volume masterpiece initially entitled “The Vanishing
Race,” then changed to The North American Indian, the technological frenzy to
capture images was to transform ecology.
22
27.4 Psychic Divides
The lessons learnt were built into a monumental psychic divide. There was the
aggressive will to power; to achieve acute detail in natural history, but also mythopoetic recollections of that indefinable line between art and science. This latter
motivation, that being-within-being wanting badly to confront the other, had captured the artistic prayers levied by the world’s public in country after country. Such
vanishing points, species, peoples, and feelings were paramount in an era where
technology had captured a bias flawed by its mass marketing, manipulations, advertising, and no thought of what all these hundreds of millions of photographs might
be doing to the fragile relations between humanity and nature, keeping in mind the
mixed adage that familiarity may breed love affairs, or accelerate an indifference to
multiplicities all proffering the same thing, as destruction proceeded apace.
The photographic suasion had catapulted the picture of a landscape behind a
Burgundian chateau in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, and his heliogravure of a
man leading a horse a year earlier, thought to be the oldest known photograph;
23
“of
19 https://www.nps.gov/yose/blogs/curious-matters-where-two-become-one.htm, Accessed March
12, 2020.
20 See https://www.donaldheald.com/pages/books/27829/carleton-e-watkins-photographer/collec
tion-of-56-stereoscopic-photographic-views-from-watkins-pacific-coast-series-principally
21 See “The California Indian in Three-Dimensional Photography,” by Peter E. Palmquist, Journal
of California and Great Basin Anthropology, Vol. 1, No. 1, Summer 1979, pp. 89–116, published
by Malki Museum, Inc., https://hstor.org/stable/27824948
22 See Edward S. Curtis: One Hundred Masterworks, curated by Christopher Cardozo, 2015.
23 World’s Oldest Photo Sold to Library,” March 21, 2002 BBC News n.a. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/
hi/europe/1885093.stm
27 The Metaphysics of Photography