Archaeologies of Immersion

Metaphors of Immersion. Stereoscopes, 3D Vision and Photography in O.W. Holmes’ Writings and Inventions

Author(s)
Keywords
  • Stereoscope
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes
  • Media Archaeology
  • 3D Vision
  • Photography
Abstract

Esteemed physician and writer, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was also a leading figure in the stereoscope craze that swept the United States in the second half of the 19th century. He not only designed and promoted a particularly successful version of the stereoscope but also provided insightful commentary on its use and impact. This device, capable of producing a vivid illusion of three-dimensionality, had a significant influence on both technological advancements and cultural practices of the time. Adopting an interdisciplinary focus that intersects media archaeology and metaphorology, this paper will explore the rhetoric and material configurations of the stereoscope as designed and promoted by Holmes and Joseph L. Bates. The main objective is to show how the discursive communication surrounding this device, along with its ergonomic design, shaped both the identity and moral connotations of the technology, as well as the immersive practices it fostered. By focusing on two key essays published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1859 and 1861, this study will reconstruct Holmes’ complex metaphorology of technical reproduction and stereoscopic illusion, highlighting the central aesthetic, social, and political themes at play.

References
  1. Adey, P., Aerial Life (Hoboken NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010).
  2. Althusser, L., “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’état. (Notes pour une recherche),” La pensée 151 (1970): 3-38.
  3. Balzer, R., Peepshows: A Visual History (New York: Abrams, 1998).
  4. Baudelaire, C., “On Photography,” (1859) in J. Mayne, ed., The Mirror of Art (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1956).
  5. Baudrillard, J., The Ecstasy of Communication (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1988).
  6. Baxter, S., Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of Deep Time (New York: Tor Books, 2004).
  7. Bazin, A., “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” (1945) in H. Gray, ed., What Is Cinema, Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
  8. Benjamin, W., “The Work of Art in the Age Mechanical Reproduction,” (1935), in H. Arendt, Illuminations (1968) (New York: Schocken Book, 2007).
  9. Blumenberg, H., Paradigms for a Metaphorology (1960) (New York: Cornell University Press, 2011).
  10. Blumenberg, H., Work on myth. trans. R. M. Wallace (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1985).
  11. Bolter, J. D., Grusin. R., Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1999).
  12. Bould, M., The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (London-New York: Routledge, 2009).
  13. Braun, M., Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
  14. Bruno, G., Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso Books, 2002).
  15. Bruno, G., Atmospheres of Projection. Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).
  16. Crary, J., Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990) (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2012).
  17. Curtius, E.R., European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948), trans. W. R. Trask, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).
  18. De la Fuente, E., “Frames, Handles and Landscapes: Georg Simmel and the Aesthetic Ecology of Things,” in T. Kemple and O. Pyyhtinen, eds., The Anthem Companion to Georg Simmel (London: Anthem Press, 2016).
  19. Dorrian, M., Pousin, F., eds., Seeing from Above. The Aerial View in Visual Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
  20. Dufour, D., Delage, C., Images à charge: La construction de la preuve par l’image (Paris: Le Bal, 2015).
  21. Fiorentino, G., Il Flaneur e lo spettatore. La fotografia dallo stereoscopio all’immagine digitale (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2014).
  22. Foucault, M. The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
  23. Foucault, M., Martin, L.H, Gutman, H., Hutton, P.H., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).
  24. Gilpin, W., Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape (London: R. Blamire, 1792).
  25. Holmes, O.W., “Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture: With a Stereoscopic Trip across the Atlantic,” The Atlantic Monthly (July 1861): 13-29.
  26. Huhtamo, E., “From kaleidoscomaniac to cyberned: Notes toward an Archaeology of the media,” in T. Druckerey, ed., Electric Culture: Technology and Visual Representation (New York: Aperture, 1996): 296-304.
  27. Hutton, J., Theory of the Earth (Edinburgh: Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1788).
  28. Khrebtan-Hörhager, J., Communicating the Other across Cultures (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023).
  29. Koopman, C., Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).
  30. Lakoff, G., Johnson, M., Metaphors We Live By (1980) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
  31. Marey, É.J., Le Mouvement (Paris: G. Masson, 1894).
  32. Marx, K., Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3 (1867) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991).
  33. Mason, W., The English Garden: A Poem in Four Books (Dublin: P. Byrne, 1786).
  34. Mitchell, W.J.T., “Imperial Landscape,” in Mitchell, W.J.T, ed., Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994): 5-34.
  35. Molderings, H., Wedekind, G., L’évidence photographique la conception positiviste de la photographie en question (Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2009).
  36. Monea, A., Packer, J., “Media Genealogy and the Politics of Archeology,” International Journal of Communication 10 (2016): 3141-59,
  37. Nochlin, L., “The Imaginary Orient,” in L. Nochlin, ed., The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-century Art and Society (London-New York: Routledge, 1989).
  38. Plunkett, J., “‘Feeling Seeing’: Touch, Vision and the Stereoscope,” History of Photography 37, no. 4 (2013): 389-96, 396, https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2013.785718.396.
  39. Plunkett, J., “Selling Stereoscopy, 1890-1915: Penny Arcades, Automatic Machines and American Salesmen,” Early Popular Visual Culture 6, no. 3 (2008): 239-55, https://doi.org/10.1080/17460650802443027;
  40. Poe, E. A., “The Daguerreotype.” Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, (January 15, 1840).
  41. Riegl, A., Late Roman Art Industry (1901) (Rome: Bretschneider Giorgio, 1985).
  42. Said, E.W., Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
  43. Somaini, A., “Walter Benjamin’s Media Theory: The Medium and the Apparat,” Grey Room 62 (2016): 6-41, https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00188.
  44. Sontag, S., On Photography (New York: Picador, 1977).
  45. Strauven, W., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006).
  46. Teukolski, R. Picture World: Image, Aesthetics, and Victorian New Media (Oxford University Press, 2020).
  47. Trachtenberg, A., Reading American Photographs: Images as History (1989) (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008).
  48. Väliaho, P., Projecting Spirits: Speculation, Providence, and Early Modern Optical Media (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2022).
  49. Wade, N., Brewster and Wheatstone on Vision (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1983).
  50. West, N.M., “Fantasy, Photography, and the Marketplace: Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Stereoscope,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 19, no. 3 (1996): 231-58, 237, https://doi.org/10.1080/08905499608583425.
  51. Willett Cunnington, C., English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century: A Comprehensive Guide with 1,117 Illustrations (New York: Dover Publications, 1990).
  52. Zielinski, S., Deep Time of the Media: Towards and Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006).
Read Article
Published

30 December 2024 — Updated on 7 April 2025

DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/26638
How to Cite
Malaspina, R. (2025). Metaphors of Immersion. Stereoscopes, 3D Vision and Photography in O.W. Holmes’ Writings and Inventions. AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433], 3(II), 151–176. https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/26638
Copy

Issue
Vol. 3 No. II (2024): Liberty on Parole? Challenges in Interactivity

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.
License
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.