Reading Stereoviews: The Aesthetics of Monstrous Space
2015; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 39; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/03087298.2015.1004259
ISSN2150-7295
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Art and Culture Studies
ResumoAbstractIn this essay I argue that the diverse archive of stereoscopic imagery has not so far been properly read historically – that is, in relation to its material and discursive context. The early-nineteenth-century context was characterised by multiple positions in debate which can be used to make sense of three broad projects of stereoscopic representation. The first, naïve realist project was to subsume stereoscopy under geometric optics and to claim for it verisimilitude to the thing represented, and in the process leave unchallenged the conventions of perspective painting as a model of how we actually see. The second was to embrace the stereoscope’s contribution to a long-standing critique of the anomalies of binocular ‘natural vision’ and to explore a new pictorial logic of geometrically impossible objects in geometrically monstrous space – an aesthetic that I begin here to document. This was not so much a project of ‘realism’ as of verisimilitude to a radically transformed conception of natural vision – one that had already begun and would continue to undermine the ‘truth’ of perspective convention. The third project was anti-realist, inspired by evidence that spatial perception was not determined by external stimulus but rather constructed through the intervention of a sometimes capricious spatial imagination.Keywords: stereoscopestereoviewbinocular convergencebinocular disparityrealismperspectival spatial conventionsbinocular spatial conventionsspatial perceptionnatural vision as historically conditionedabstract photographyDavid Brewster (1781–1861)Charles Wheatstone (1802–75)Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–94) I would like to acknowledge the following people and institutions for their assistance in obtaining reproductions and permissions for the images used in this article: Urte Brauckmann, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science; Stephen Wildman and Jennifer Shepherd, The Ruskin Foundation (Ruskin Library, Lancaster University); Sheldon MacDonald and Rita Murray, Angus L. Macdonald Library, St. Francis Xavier University; and Joanna McManus, The Royal Society, London. I would also like to thank the editor and two anonymous readers for their careful and constructive comments.Notes1 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1990.2 John Plunkett, ‘“Feeling Seeing”: Touch, Vision and the Stereoscope’, History of Photography, 37:4 (November 2013), 389–96.3 Prior to Plunkett’s questioning of Crary’s logic of rupture, dissatisfaction had begun to appear here and there in footnotes. See Anne McCauley, ‘Talbot’s Rouen Window: Romanticism, Naturphilosophie and the Invention of Photography’, History of Photography, 26:2 (Summer 2002), 126 n.10; and Jutta Schickore, ‘Misperception, Illusion and Epistemological Optimism: Vision Studies in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain and Germany’, The British Journal for the History of Science, 39:3 (September 2006), 390 n.27.4 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 124.5 Ibid., 122 and 124.6 Ibid., 125–26.7 Ibid., 124 and 132.8 Richard J. Difford, ‘In Defence of Pictorial Space: Stereoscopic Photography and Architecture in the Nineteenth Century’, in Camera Constructs: Photography, Architecture and the Modern City, ed. Andrew Higgott and Timothy Wray, Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate 2012, 305.9 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Pantheon Books 1972, 168. Crary writes that linear perspective and the camera obscura were ‘obviously’ related, by which he presumably means that for the Classical paradigm in optics the logic of the projection of the ‘painting’ on the retina, on the artist’s canvas, and on the internal screen of the camera obscura was identical. However, Crary insists on distinguishing perspective from the camera since, firstly, camera images moved and, secondly, unlike a perspective painting, there was no correct point of sight for viewing a camera image. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 34 and 41. The latter, not an eighteenth-century idea, is simply false. The former is trivial: retinal images also moved, but optical writers were not troubled that this might alter their perspectival geometry. See, for example, Claude Nicolas Le Cat, A Physical Essay on the Senses, London: R. Griffiths 1750, 210–11. Jean Leurechon recognised in 1621 both the commonplace that the camera obscura projected a ‘painting […] in perspective’ but also that the image moved. Cited in Laurent Mannoni and Richard Crangle, The Great Art of Light and Shadow, Exeter: University of Exeter Press 2000, 12.10 William Molyneux, Dioptrica Nova, London: Benj. Tooke 1692, 287–89.11 Those who embraced machinic forms of visual exhibition included rural and working-class people who enjoyed peepshows for a penny at fairs and markets as well as those of the ‘higher ranks’, educated and with an elective affinity for rational recreation. Richard Balzer, Peepshows: A Visual History, New York: Harry N. Abrams 1998, 12 and 20. Such amusements were generally looked down upon as commercial and ‘mechanick’ by the titled, the landed gentry and those who aspired to their status. See Rod Bantjes, ‘Hybrid Projection, Machinic Exhibition and the Eighteenth-Century Critique of Vision’, Art History, 37:5 (November 2014), 925.12 Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1931), trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson, London: G. Allen & Unwin 1958, 101 and 106.13 Ibid., 103.14 Molyneux, Dioptrica Nova, 287–89.15 Rene Descartes, ‘Discourse and Essays: Optics’ (1637), in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham et al., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984, discourse 4, 165.16 Ibid.17 Giambattista Della Porta (1558) and Constantin Huygens (1622) cited in David Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, New York: Viking 2006, 208 and 210; and Francesco Algarotti, An Essay on Painting, London: L. Davis and C. Reymers 1764, 64.18 I take the ‘stereoview’ to be the combined effect of the particular viewing box, a particular pair of images (the ‘stereogram’) and a particularly constituted viewing subject.19 Without such constraint ‘every Object will appear unnatural and preposterous’. John Kirby, Dr. Brook Taylor’s Method of Perspective, Ipswich: W. Craighton 1754, 66.20 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1991, 60.21 Ibid., 54.22 See Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, London: T. Cadell 1769, 154–56.23 William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye (1782), Richmond: The Richmond Publishing Co. Ltd 1973, 8.24 On reference planes, see Reid, Inquiry, 321; and Robert Smith, A Compleat System of Opticks, Cambridge: Cornelius Crownfield 1738, 49.25 George Berkeley, An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision, Dublin: Aaron Rhames for Jeremy Pepyat 1709.26 See George Berkeley, The Theory of Vision […] Vindicated and Explained (1733), London: Macmillan & Co. 1860, sect. LIX, 104–06.27 Berkeley, Essay Towards a New Theory, sect. LXVII–LXXVIII, 73–92; and Berkeley, Theory of Vision, sect. LIX–LX, 49–50.28 William Molyneux, ‘Concerning the Apparent Magnitude of the Sun and Moon’, Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 16 (1688), 314–23.29 For a review of debates on the horizontal moon, see Hermann von Helmholtz, Treatise on Physiological Optics, Volume III (1867), New York: Dover Publications 1962, 360–62. For uses of a horizontal reference plane, see Smith, A Compleat System, 161; and Molyneux, ‘Concerning the Apparent Magnitude’, 325–26.30 Berkeley, Essay Towards a New Theory, sect. XIV.31 Berkeley, Essay Towards a New Theory, sect. XLV, 50; for a similarly Berkelean view, see Helmholtz, Treatise, 23.32 Hume thought the point ‘acknowledg’d by the most rational philosophers’. David Hume and L. A. Selby-Bigge, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Oxford: Clarendon 1896, 191.33 Descartes, ‘Discourse and Essays: Optics’, discourse 6, 170; and William Porterfield, A Treatise on the Eye, Edinburgh: G. Hamilton and J. Balfour 1759, 388.34 Descartes, ‘Discourse and Essays: Optics’, figure 8, discourse 6, 169; and Molyneux, Dioptrica Nova, 288–90.35 Descartes, ‘Discourse and Essays: Optics’, 169.36 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 128.37 Claude De Chales, cited by Porterfield, Treatise, 394. At that distance, each eye is 0.01° off parallel.38 Molyneux, Dioptrica Nova, 113–14; Joseph Harris, A Treatise on Optics, London: B. White 1775, 171; Smith, A Compleat System, 41; and William B. Carpenter, Principles of Human Physiology, London: John Churchill 1853, 681.39 Reid, Inquiry, 315.40 Bantjes, ‘Hybrid Projection’, 928–29.41 Porterfield, Treatise, 410.42 Joseph Harris, A Treatise on Optics, London: B. White 1775, sect. 316, 230; and Georg Füsslin, Der Guckkasten, Stuttgart: Füsslin 1995, 46–47.43 Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860, Basingstoke: Palgrave 2001, 7–8 and 42–43.44 E. H. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye: Further Studies in Pictorial Representation, Oxford: Phaidon 1982, 254.45 On this phenomenon in natural vision, see Porterfield, Treatise, 408.46 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 125.47 Gilpin, Observations, 12.48 On circumparent objects in natural vision, see Smith, A Compleat System, sect. 244, 41.49 Ibid.50 Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’, The Atlantic Monthly (June 1859), 744.51 Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘Sun-Painting and Sun Sculpture’, The Atlantic Monthly (July 1861), 23.52 Robert Howlett, ‘Optics Mr. Ross’s New Lens’, The Journal and Transactions of the Photographic Society of Great Britain, 5:73 (1858), 74; see also Rod Bantjes, ‘“Vertical Perspective Does Not Exist”: The Scandal of Converging Verticals and the Final Crisis of Perspectiva Artificialis’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 75:2 (April 2014), 305–36.53 Bantjes, ‘“Vertical Perspective”’, 308 (original emphasis).54 Ibid., 327.55 Helmholtz, Treatise, 285.56 Editor, ‘Seeing with Two Eyes: The Stereoscope’, The Leisure Hour Monthly Library (29 July 1852), 490.57 Editor, ‘The Stereoscope’, Dublin University Magazine (May 1857), 601.58 Reprinted in ‘Seeing with Two Eyes’; and ‘The Stereoscope, Pseudoscope, and Solid Daguerreotypes’, Frank Leslie’s New York Journal, 1:3 (1855), 173.59 John Newton, ‘On Binocular Vision and the Theory of the Stereoscope’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 9 (November 1856), 272; David Brewster, ‘Binocular Vision and the Stereoscope’, The North British Review, 17:33 (May 1852), 91; and William Stowell, ‘The Stereoscope’, Eclectic Review, 2 (July 1858), 38–46.60 Brewster, ‘Binocular Vision’, 94.61 Brewster, cited in Plunkett, ‘“Feeling Seeing”’, 391 n.15; and Charles Wheatstone, ‘Contributions to the Physiology of Vision – Part the First. On Some Remarkable, and Hitherto Unobserved, Phenomena of Binocular Vision’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 128 (1838), 387–88.62 Wheatstone, ‘Contributions – Part the First’, 376.63 Ibid., 385.64 David Brewster, The Stereoscope, London: John Murray 1856, 28; and Brewster, ‘Binocular Vision’, 171 (original emphasis).65 Brewster, ‘Binocular Vision’, 96.66 See also Brewster, cited in Plunkett, ‘“Feeling Seeing”’, 393 n. 29.67 Wheatstone, ‘Contributions – Part the First’, 392–93.68 Helmholtz, Treatise, 453 and 456.69 Helmholtz, Treatise, 452; and Newton, ‘On Binocular Vision’, 272.70 Wheatstone, ‘Contributions – Part the First’, 393; see also Charles Wheatstone, ‘Contributions to the Physiology of Vision – Part the Second’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 142:1 (1852), 13.71 Brewster, ‘Binocular Vision’, 108–09; and Wheatstone, ‘Contributions – Part the First’, 392–93.72 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Oxford: Oxford University Press 1975, book 2, chapter 23, sect. 2; George Berkeley, ‘A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge’ (1710), in The Works of George Berkeley, ed. Alexander C. Fraser, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1901, passim., sections 18, 23 and 26; and Hume, Treatise, book 1, part 4, section 2.73 On the pre-structuring of particular objects, see the discussion of ‘schemas’ in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781), trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London: Macmillan 1965, 180–03 [A137–142]; for the general arguments, see particularly 71–74 [A26–30] and 111–12 [A77–79].74 See Alexander Bain, Mental Science a Compendium of Psychology, and the History of Philosophy (1868), New York: D. Appleton and Co. 1870, 191–93.75 Carpenter, cited in Plunkett, ‘“Feeling Seeing”’, 391 n.14.76 See his dispute with Wheatstone’s interpretation of Necker cube inversion. Brewster, The Stereoscope, 229–30; see also William B. Carpenter, ‘Binocular Vision’, The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal, 108:220 (1858), 456.77 David Brewster, ‘On the Optical Illusion of the Conversion of Cameos into Intaglios, and of Intaglios into Cameos’, Edinburgh Journal of Science, 4:1 (1826), 99–108. Schickore overgeneralises Brewster’s tolerance for the role of mental intention in spatial construction based on this early work. Brewster’s position shifted and hardened, perhaps in his determination to refute Wheatstone. Schickore, ‘Misperception’, 393.78 Wheatstone, ‘Contributions – Part the Second’, 13–15.79 Crary uncritically accepts Brewster’s (admittedly mechanical) theory of suture. While he mentions ‘retinal disparity’, Crary seems to think that it means ‘different angles’ of binocular convergence. Crary’s confusion is confirmed when he claims that ‘Wheatstone’s conclusions in 1833 [sic] came out of the successful measurement of binocular parallax, or the degree to which the angle of the axis of each eye differed when focussed on the same point’. He fails to understand both Wheatstone’s insistence on the suture of dissimilar images and its epistemological implications. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 119 and 120–22.80 Despite Robert Silverman’s claims, appeals to natural theology were rare in discussions of the reliability of binocular space perception. Robert Silverman, ‘The Stereoscope and Photographic Depiction in the 19th Century’, Technology and Culture, 34:4 (October 1993), 733. One of Brewster’s only explicit references to divine intent was to account for why the Almighty had not corrected for chromatic aberration or given the eye the directional precision of a transit: ‘because it was unnecessary’. David Brewster, ‘On the Law of Visible Position in Single and Binocular Vision, and on the Representation of Solid Figures by the Union of Two Dissimilar Plane Figures on the Retinae’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 15:3 (1844), 360. Proponents of natural theology such as William Paley and Peter Mark Roget were well aware of the known flaws of vision. William Paley, Natural Theology (1802), London: C. J. G. and F. Rivington 1815, 56; and Schickore, ‘Misperception’, 401–02. Their claims for God’s ‘perfect’ design came with the very serious caveat: perfectly adapted to ‘all the ordinary practical purposes of life’. Leonhard Euler cited in Schickore, ‘Misperception’, 403. This position is no different from that of sceptics such as Descartes and Berkeley, who both grant that natural vision is adequate to local and quotidian purposes. They insist that unaided vision is not up to the logical and mathematical precision required by science (for example, Berkeley’s problem of judging the size and distance of the moon) or a philosophy of indubitable truth.81 Accounts of the fallibility of the eye were typically accompanied by discussions of engineered improvements: see Descartes, ‘Discourse and Essays: Optics’, discourses 7–10; Molyneux, Dioptrica Nova, 207 and 238; Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1985, 36; and Schickore, ‘Misperception’, 383–405.82 Harry Woolf, The Transits of Venus: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Science, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1959.83 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 147. However, late-nineteenth-century photography, conceived as a ‘chemical retina’, did offer the hope of eliminating subjective reports of visual impressions entirely in some branches of science. See Bernard Lightman, ‘The Visual Theology of Victorian Popularizers of Science: From Reverent Eye to Chemical Retina’, Isis, 91:4 (December 2000), 676–77; Holly Rothermel, ‘Images of the Sun: Warren De La Rue, George Biddell Airy and Celestial Photography’, The British Journal for the History of Science, 26:2 (June 1993), 153; and Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, ‘The Image of Objectivity’, Representations, 40 (Autumn 1992), 83.84 Spatial inversions were taken up as problems first and foremost because they appeared to affect the artificial sensorium (for instance, microscopes). See Brewster, ‘On the Optical Illusion’, 100. On eighteenth-century scientists’ concern with the theoretical validation of their observational apparatuses, see also Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1970, 26–34.85 There is a tendency to conflate technological mediation in scientific observation with technological mediation in exhibition (quite different in its epistemological implications regardless of whether exhibitors claim that their purpose is scientific education). See, for example, Iwan Morus, ‘Illuminating Illusions, or, the Victorian Art of Seeing Things’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 10:1 (February 2012), 37–50.86 On Faraday, see Schickore, ‘Misperception’, 397; on wallpaper illusions, see Brewster, ‘Binocular Vision’, 103–04.87 Concern about the deceptive uses of magic lanterns on the gullible dates back to the seventeenth century. Mannoni, The Great Art, 12 and 53. On the risks of deception of the new media of the late eighteenth century, see Bantjes, ‘Hybrid Projection’, 925.88 Concern with demystifying machinic exhibition is as old as the magic lantern. The hands-on ethic of rational recreation that emphasised building or at least operating optical devices probably originated in the eighteenth century and is exemplified in texts such as William Hooper, Rational Recreations, London: L. Davis 1774. While interested in what she calls ‘undeceiving’ rather than rational recreation proper, Wendy Bellion gives a brilliant account of its democratic political logic in the late eighteenth century. Wendy Bellion, Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2011. Steven Shapin and Barry Barnes give a precise listing of those in England in the early nineteenth century who had an elective affinity for it: ‘physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries; dissenting divines; “enlightened” manufacturers and merchants’. They also show that efforts were being made to extend rational recreation to the labour elite of artisans and ‘mechanics’. Brewster’s work was directed in part to this broader audience. See Steven Shapin and Barry Barnes, ‘Science, Nature and Control: Interpreting Mechanics’ Institutes’, Social Studies of Science, 7:1 (February 1977), 34 and 36; and James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2000, 50.89 Wheatstone, ‘Contributions – Part the First’, 393 and 382.90 It was a vain hope; indeed, James T. McIlwain writes, that there ‘exists at present no adequate neurophysiologic theory of how the brain actually achieves perceptual fusion of the two retinal images’. James T. McIlwain, An Introduction to the Biology of Vision, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996, 165.91 The original version appears to have been Charles A. Long, Practical Photography on Glass and Paper, London: Bland & Long 1856, 47. James Dawson Burn attributes it to a catalogue of the London Stereoscopic Company. See James Dawson Burn, ‘Photography and the Stereoscope’, in Commercial Enterprise and Social Progress, London: Piper, Stephenson & Spence 1858, 30–32. Other versions include: Chambers, Chamber’s Information for the Million, or One Thousand and One Things Worth Knowing Comprising the History and Mystery of Everything in Common Use, New York: Hurst & Co n.d., 297; C. W. Allan, The History and Mystery of Common Things, New York: John B. Alden 1885, 297; W. A. Townsend, Fireside Philosophy or Familiar Talks About Common Things (for Boys and Girls), New York: W. A. Townsend & Company 1861, 297; Ross Murray, ‘A Familiar Explanation of the Phenomena Produced by the Stereoscope’, in Warne’s Model Housekeeper: A Manual of Domestic Economy in All Its Branches, London: F. Warne & Co. 1879, 80 [reproduced in Advocate and Family Guardian, 27:2 (1861), 36; and The Philadelphia Photographer, 7:74 (1870), 43–45]; Benjamin Silliman, ‘Binocular Vision’, in Principles of Physics, or Natural Philosophy; Designed for the Use of Colleges and Schools, Philadelphia: H. C. Peck & T. Bliss 1860, 345; and John Henry Pepper, ‘The Stereoscope’, in Cyclopædic Science Simplified, London: F. Warne and Co. 1869, 68. A little of Berkeley and Wheatstone was being dispersed here to an audience much broader in terms of class, gender and age than the ‘genteel and commercial classes that had consumed natural philosophical systems during the eighteenth century’. See Secord, Victorian Sensation, 46.92 M. Claudet, ‘The Stereoscope and Its Photographic Applications’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 1 (January 1853), 97 [republished in The Year-Book of Facts in Science and Art, ed. John Timbs, London: David Bouge 1854]; Arthur Parsey, The Science of Vision; or, Natural Perspective, London: Longman & Co. 1840, 33–34; and William Gawin Herdman, A Treatise on the Curvilinear Perspective of Nature: And Its Applicability to Art, London: J. Neale & Co. 1853, 43.93 Robert Hunt, ‘The Stereoscope’, Art Journal, new series 2 (1 April 1856), 118. Two years later Hunt reported that the instrument was known to those presumably without drawing rooms: ‘We have stereoscopes produced for a shilling, which, to some extent, have brought the pleasure of them home to the poor’. Robert Hunt, ‘The Stereoscope and Its Improvements’, Art Journal, new series 4 (1 October 1858), 305.94 Robert Hunt, ‘Energiatype: A New Photographic Process’, The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 24:78 (1844), 544. On the camera obscura as a machine for producing ‘truly formed’ perspective, see Benjamin Martin, A New and Compendious System of Optics, London: J. Hodges 1740, 166.95 On lenses and perspective, see Thomas Sutton, ‘Leader’, Photographic Notes, 3 (July 1858), 155; on framing and the problem of the ‘disproportionate foreground’, see G. B., ‘Landscape Photography: Chapter 1’, The Illustrated Photographer: Scientific and Art Journal (31 December 1869), 583; on ‘perspective control’, see Bantjes, ‘“Vertical Perspective”’, 327.96 Wheatstone, ‘Contributions – Part the First’, 377.97 William Griswold Smith, Practical Descriptive Geometry, New York: McGraw-Hill 1912, 260–62.98 These images could not have been produced using descriptive geometry nor, as Hunt pointed out in 1856, by eye: ‘It would be almost impossible for the most accomplished artist to draw two such pictures [views of exhibitions, scenery etc.] with sufficient correctness to produce the solid image in the stereoscope. The photographic camera, and the sensitive photographic processes which we now employ comes [sic] to our aid’. Hunt, ‘The Stereoscope’, 120.99 Crary, cited in Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Enslaved Sovereign, Observed Spectator: On Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer’, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 6:2 (January 1993), 80.100 ‘On Squinting as One of the Arts’, Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts, 9:222 (April 1858), 209.
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