Sets of stereographic images, and the stereoscopes needed to view them, were ubiquitous objects in Victorian drawing rooms. In Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary refers to the stereoscope as a “quintessentially nineteenth-century device” (59) that operated in a very different way from earlier technologies including the camera obscura.

 In his book, Crary emphasizes the distinctness of stereographic technology in that its very functionality emerged from what was then a radically new understanding of depth perception, which depended upon “organization of optical cues (and the amalgamation of the observer into a component of the apparatus), [and] eradicates the very field on which eighteenth-century knowledge arranged itself” (59). For Crary, the stereoscope was the site where the various nineteenth century developments in the technology of optics and in theories of perception leapt beyond their eighteenth century predecessors and converged in a mechanical device. Further, the stereoscope was a mechanical device that incorporated the viewer, enlisting his or her body and mind as an essential component of the machine itself. Victorian viewers, judging by their willingness to purchase these stereoscopes and stereo sets, were eager to serve in this capacity. For them, the experience of viewing stereographic images through a stereoscope offered a nearly tactile pleasure unlike any other media experience.

Rosalind Krauss evocatively explains what is pleasurable in the experience of looking through the stereoscope, emphasizing in her description the way that the stereoscope separates the viewer while simultaneously transporting him or her. She writes: “the viewer’s own ambient space is masked out by the optical instrument he must hold before his eyes. As he views the image in an ideal isolation, his own surrounds, with their walls and floors, are banished from sight” (314). The viewer remains comfortable and secure within his or her domestic setting, yet beholds images that seem to take him or her to another place. Krauss compares the pleasure of viewing stereographs with the pleasure of the cinema, commenting that, “in both, the image transports the viewer optically, while his body remains immobile. In both, the pleasure derives from the experience of the simulacrum: the appearance of reality from which any testing of the real-effect by actually, physically, moving through the scene is denied” (314). Though the viewer was unable to move through the scene he or she beheld, he or she could experience the pleasure of viewing new and exotic cities and landscapes, through this format that offered something slightly more than the purely vicarious experience of reading a travelogue or even gazing at flat snapshot or non-stereographic postcard.

In the 1890’s companies such as the Keystone View Company and Underwood and Underwood created a revival in the popularity of stereoscopic images. These companies produced and marketed images that they declared could serve an overtly educational function (Malin 405). Underwood and Underwood, in particular, specialized in the production of stereographic images of exotic lands. Through these sets of stereo cards, the company “offered a mediated, middle-class version of upper-class travel which they framed as an important source of enlightenment and cultivation” (410). In the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, middle class consumers who perhaps lacked the means to fund a grand tour could simulate the experience through purchasing and viewing these stereograph sets. Looking at stereographs was understood to be literally a transcendent experience (407), not only because of their simulated three-dimensionality but also due to the intensity created through the isolation required by the viewing device (410). This transcendence, when coupled with the right sort of visual subject matter, could result in educational experiences that could come close to the life-altering experience of travel abroad, helping the viewer develop her understanding of culture and fine-tune her moral compass while cementing her own sense of socioeconomic identity. These stereograph sets were marketed as educational tools and the images they contain certainly do present visual data about the regions they ostensibly catalog. However, late Victorian stereograph sets tell far more about the priorities, anxieties and obsessions of the culture that produced them than they do about the countries they presume to profile.

An Underwood and Underwood set of images offering a stereographic tour of Mexico (published very early in the 20th century) serves as an example of the firm inscription of Victorian preoccupations over documentary images of an exotic land. When we consider this set of images, it is important to note that the set was indeed intended to be an exhaustive study of Mexico that could function as a satisfactory substitute for the experience of having been there. In this sense, the stereograph set is an example of the nineteenth-century preoccupation with the expansive collection, assemblage, and organization of empirical data, visual data in particular. Krauss writes that stereograph sets were a part of a broad cultural project that aimed to acquire a full understanding of the world, and these sets offered “ the possibility of storing and crossreferencing bits of information and of collating them through the particular grid of a system of knowledge” (Kraus 315). In Fiction in the Age of Photography, Nancy Armstrong confirms that the Victorians understood and embraced photography as a process that could make it possible to “visualize chunks of the world that a person was not likely to see… (photography) seemed capable, through repetition, of representing the visible world as it actually was, whole and entire” (Armstrong 14-15). Stereograph sets were part of an overall methodology through which the Victorians pursued their impulse to collect, accumulate, and map the world, transforming its people and places into texts that could not only be read but also archived (15).

Understanding that these stereographic images of Mexico did presume to render an all-inclusive portrait of the country becomes fascinating within this context as we consider which places, people, objects, and commodities were selected to compose this view of Mexico and the specific way these elements were represented within the images. Perhaps even more telling is the realization of which elements were excluded from these views. Considering the Underwood and Underwood stereographs alongside other images from the rich tradition of photographs of Mexico, particularly those made by Tina Modotti a little later on in the 20th century, yields further insight into the ways that the Victorian agenda appears inscribed within them.

In the Underwood and Underwood stereograph set of images of Mexico, the stereo cards fall into several categories or types of images, and there are multiple images in each particular group. There are thirty images that depict farmers, factory workers, agricultural products, or market spaces; fifteen images of landscape vistas, (eleven of which feature anonymous people figured in the foreground), nine cathedral exteriors, three cathedral interiors, five images of historical significance (monuments or tombs), two images of parks or leisure spaces, six pastoral scenes, six images featuring opulent palaces or luxurious social clubs, and eight images that I would classify as “exotics”— images that show native people, particularly women, within lush or primitive surroundings.

A review of this catalog highlights the overwhelming dominance within this set of stereo cards of images that have to do with farming, manufacturing, and commerce. There are also many sweeping vistas that showcase Mexico’s natural beauty and abundant resources. Mexico’s identity as a Catholic nation is clearly represented in the many images of cathedral exteriors and interiors, which also serve as an encapsulating nod towards Mexico’s contribution to art and architecture. A small but distinctive handful of images of wealth and opulence stand out from the rest of the set in incongruous relief—the marble and gilt details shown within them forming an extreme contrast to the conditions of the laboring poor featured in so many of the other images. The stereo set rarely catches the people of Mexico in a moment of leisure—the images almost always show the people of Mexico hard at work in fields, in factories and at small craft industries, or in marketplaces. When they are not laboring, they are usually serving to frame a vista for the photographer. The composite picture of this Mexico created by these stereographs is an image of a place that is rich in natural resources and agricultural products, where there is cheap and abundant labor, there are efficient factories, versatile and exotic women, and a difficult to access and immensely wealthy and privileged upper class. Images of the many cathedrals remind the viewer that all of these elements are contained within the familiar safe structures of a Christian culture—a quainter version of Christian culture, certainly, and one that still allows for the possibility of glimpsing enticing moments of mysticism and exotic sensuality, at the watering hole or “a pretty nook in the tropical forest” (Underwood and Underwood slide 98).

There are several interesting omissions from this catalog of images. Aside from one image showing a small group of natives outside their hut, and another image on the opposite side of the socioeconomic spectrum of a silver baron ensconced in his opulent mansion, there are no images of the private homes of Mexican people—no exteriors of homes nor any ordinary domestic interiors. Certainly there may be residential homes in the jumble of buildings that comprise some of the vistas, but these homes are never referenced or pointed to in the captions; they never form the Barthesian studium of any of the images. One might justifiably assume from the images in this stereograph set that in the Mexico of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were no middle class citizens who lived in middle class homes—there were only the extremely rich who lived in mansions or palaces, and the very poor, who lived in huts.

Furthermore, apart from the cathedrals and the presidential palace, there are no cultural institutions represented in these images—no museums, no universities, nor schools. Whether or not the Mexico of this time period did possess a middle class or if there were or were not schools or other cultural institutions there is not the point—the point is that a viewer of this set of images could reasonably conclude from the visual evidence contained within them that these things did not exist there.  Brenton Malin argues that sets of stereoscopic images that supported such a conclusion served a definite purpose for the Victorian consumer. With the sophisticated and technologically advanced device of the stereoscope in hand, the Victorian viewer could look at these images and affirm his or her own socioeconomic and cultural identity, thus allowing the many clear differences between his or her parlor and the exotic land to fashion the othered subjects within the images into

…foils against which their new high-tech American citizenship was compared and celebrated. As framed in these international stereoscopic images, it was only through the properly cultured, high-tech, modern white gaze of the stereoscope that spectators could truly understand the backwards, low-tech nature of these international others. (Malin 414)

These stereographs of Mexico, therefore, do not succeed in accurately representing parts or the entirety of Mexico, nor does it seem that they strive to do so. Rather, the images function to serve up Mexico before the Victorian consumer in a way that validates the Victorian consumer’s economic dominance and exploitation of the region in light of his obvious technological and cultural superiority. The images invite the Victorian consumer to survey the rich abundance of Mexico’s natural resources, while offering accompanying examples of the region’s primitive charms.

Each of the stereographic images in this set is captioned with a sentence or sentence fragment that locates the picture geographically and sometimes offers an additional bit of information about it. On some of these stereo cards, the captions are translated on the back of the card into six different languages—a detail indicating that these images were intended for not only a domestic market but also an international one.

On the front of the cards, the caption is always printed only underneath the right stereo image, and so it is legible as the viewer experiences the stereo view when looking through the scope. Almost all of the captions, after listing the image’s specific location, redundantly indicate that the image is of “Mexico.” Presumably, this would help a viewer understand the context of the image even if the card were isolated from the set or mixed in with another set of stereographic images.

Because the captions overwhelmingly refrain from employing commentary and rarely utilize adjectives, it is interesting to consider when the captions vary from this spare model and employ comparatives or superlatives, or seem to pass judgment on the subject of the stereograph. For example, while no other pairing of caption and image within this set seems to set up a social critique, the caption of slide 16 confesses that the image depicts “Farming with poorly paid native help – Mexico.” Rather than building upon the critique suggested in slide 16, most of the captions in this set enthusiastically celebrate and praise the factories, often referring to one or another of them as a “great factory,” (“‘El Buen Tono,’ Mexico City, Mexico,” slide 36). The caption of slide 70 proudly declares that the image is of the “splendidly equipped carpet factory of Santa Gertrude, near Orizaba, Mexico.”

Even when the captions describe the images as “quaint,” “beautiful,” or “lovely,” or “typical,” the captions are not evocative in their descriptions do they offer up much narrative about what the images depict. Most tellingly, the captions never offer the names of the Mexican citizens who appear in the images—in fact; the captions rarely even acknowledge their presence. Only in a few rare instances where the Mexican person herself is overtly the subject of the photograph is her presence mentioned in the caption. Slide 87, “Jalapa, famed for its scenery and pretty maidens—Mexico,” and slide 98, “Native girls of Tehauntepec Isthmus—a pretty nook in the tropical forest—Mexico,” serve as excellent examples of this. In both of these images, the girls form the studium of the photograph and receive the pressure of the photographer’s, and, by extension, the viewer’s, gaze. In the “native girls” stereograph, the caption serves a necessary affirmation that these girls are native, not Western, and we as viewers can therefore enjoy the sensual display of their bodies lounging in the steamy, wet jungle with relative impunity. The need for this affirming reminder of the girls’ otherness becomes very clear when the card is placed within the stereoscope, and the device’s effect of simulating three-dimensionality extends the body of the reclining girl invitingly into the foreground, positioning her as an odalisque, rendering her curving form almost tangible. With relief the viewer can reference the caption, be reminded that she is a native woman, and continue to enjoy her within the privacy of the viewing experience created by the stereoscope, free from any tiresome moral qualms.

The way that this set of stereographic images treats the people of Mexico contrasts sharply with the images that Tina Modotti made in Mexico only twenty years later. On the surface, the subject matter of Modotti’s Mexico images is similar to the Underwood and Underwood stereograph set—she did photograph laborers and she photographed women, but her images reveal a much different agenda. An active member of the Communist party who sympathized with the plight of the Mexican worker and who advocated for Mexican nationalism, Modotti strove to capture the dignity and the grace that she saw in Mexico’s people. Modotti’s photograph Hands resting on Tool, 1927, or Labor 1: Hands Washing, 1927 are excellent examples of the marked contrast her images show when compared to Underwood and Underwood’s stereographs. Although Modotti also never gave her subjects’ names in the captions she paired with her photographs of Mexico’s people, her empathy with them can be clearly read in the tenderness with which she reveals their strength and suffering. In these pictures, Modotti focuses on the virtues of the workers, demonstrating not only their literacy but also their political engagement through pictures like Worker Reading “El Machete,” 1927 and “Campesinos Reading “El Machete,” 1929.

Modotti’s photographs of Mexican women celebrate their beauty, but do so with deep respect and sensitivity towards women’s capacity as nurturers and as revolutionary leaders. Mother and Child, Tehuantepec lovingly centers upon the gesture of a mother supporting her baby on her hip, while Woman with Flag of 1929 is an iconic image of a woman marching with a large and deep colored (presumably red) flag, her profile steadfast and resolute as she carries this billowing banner of the revolution. None of Modotti’s images of women exploit or gratuitously sexualize them, yet all of them honor the beauty and feminine power of their subjects.

Modotti’s images of the Mexican people clearly communicate her support and passion for the revolutionary movement in Mexico and her solidarity with the priorities of the people. While the stereoscopes of Mexico in the Underwood and Underwood set treat the Mexican people as replaceable and nameless commodities, Modotti respectfully celebrates them as unique individuals. Her Women from Tehauntepec, 1929, is a good example of this. In this image, the two women walk with heavy loads, their skirts flying in the wind. Each conveys a very different expression that seems to indicate their varying characters. The woman on the left appears wry and wise, while the woman on the right looks towards the photographer in welcoming recognition, smiling as if to greet a friend.

The operators who produced Underwood and Underwood’s stereographs of Mexico seem to have established little or no rapport with the Mexican people that they included in their scenes. In many instances, the peoples’ presence in the image seems only utilitarian, as if the operator knew that the presence of a couple of people makes a picture more interesting to the viewer. Yet, the operator does not seem curious, in most cases, about the people he has photographed. Most of the time, the people seem to be present in the image simply to demonstrate that the field is busy being tilled, the pulque extracted, the factories operated, the strawberries that bloom all year, harvested.

Returning to a consideration of how stereographic images function helps to explain both the presence of human figures in nearly every image in the Underwood and Underwood Mexico stereograph set despite the operator’s apparent disinterest in them as individual subjects. In Techniques of the Observer, Crary explains that

…pronounced stereoscopic effects depend on the presence of objects or obtrusive forms in the near or middle ground; that is, there must be enough points in the image that require significant changes in the angle of convergence of the optical axes. Thus the most intense experience of the stereoscopic image coincides with an object filled space. (124-125)

Here, Crary’s explanation can be used to clarify exactly why nearly all of the spreading views and vistas of Mexico’s landscape in the Underwood and Underwood set include one or more human figures in the foreground. They are not present in the image to acquaint the viewer with the nature and character of Mexican people. Anything the viewer may learn about Mexican people through these images—details such as their manner of dress, what they carry with them, how they return the gaze—is secondary to the optical function that the human shape performs within the stereographic image. His, her, or their presence there is merely necessary in order for the stereoscopic effect to be at its best, they must stand in the foreground in order for the middle and the background to fall into their respective and receding planes. In the Underwood and Underwood stereograph images, therefore, Mexican people are often only serving as placeholders who are there to facilitate the stereographic effect—an effect served up for the benefit of, and indeed located entirely within the perception of, the Victorian viewer as he consumes the images.