Photography, Anthropology and History

Expanding the Frame

Elizabeth Edwards, Christopher Morton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781032353562
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317081098
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Photography, Anthropology and History examines the complex historical relationship between photography and anthropology, and in particular the strong emergence of the contemporary relevance of historical images. Thematically organized, and focusing on the visual practices developed within anthropology as a discipline, this book brings together a range of contemporary and methodologically innovative approaches to the historical image within anthropology. Importantly, it also demonstrates the ongoing relevance of both the historical image and the notion of the archive to recent anthropological thought. As current research rethinks the relationship between photography and anthropology, this volume will serve as a stimulus to this new phase of research as an essential text and methodological reference point in any course that addresses the relationship between anthropology and visuality.

PART I
Historicizing Visual Anthropology

Chapter 1
‘Distempered Daubs’¹ and Encyclopaedic World Maps: The Ethnographic Significance of Panoramas and Mappaemundi

Alison Griffiths

Introduction

Picture yourself walking through a darkened, narrow corridor that leads upwards to a staircase drizzled with light, feeling a little disoriented but nevertheless eager to reach the top. The year is 1793, and you have just paid to enter Irishman Robert Barker’s patented 360 degree panorama entitled The Grand Fleet at Spithead 1791 (Figure 1.1). When you finally reach the observation deck, a platform designed to resemble the poop deck of a frigate, emerging out of the darkness and a little disoriented, you find yourself gazing out at sea, or so it seems, having left the throbbing streets of the bustling metropole for another time and space. Here’s how an anonymous contributor to The Leisure Hour described the experience in 1886:

[W]e find ourselves in the centre of a landscape. We are standing seemingly on a hill, and around us in every direction stretches the wide ranging country. Above us is a canopy which prevents us looking too far up into the sky. Below us is a real foreground with bushes and trees, and facing us is what we know is a picture, but which looks so lifelike that we have great difficulty in persuading ourselves the scene is not real. Nowhere does the illusion fail; nowhere is there the sign of a frame or join; and it is only when we find that the figures, though all in action, remain motionless, we recognize how our senses were cheated at first glance. (1886: 45–46)

As futile as it may seem to try and reconstruct late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century audience experiences of panoramas for a twenty-first-century one, and wary of reproducing contemporaneous hyperbolic accounts of the ‘unsurpassed realism’ of the attraction, I want to suggest that there nevertheless remains something very strange (even uncanny) in the panorama experience, and that this strangeness is instrumental in how we recuperate ethnographic meaning from this nineteenth-century popular amusement. The three extant painted panoramas from the nineteenth century I have seen (only two of which are in their original rotundas) – the Mesdag Panorama in the Hague, the Cyclorama of Jerusalem outside of Quebec City, and the Gettysburg Panorama in Pennsylvania – invite a peculiarly embodied form of spectatorship, evoking what film theorist Vivian Sobchack describes as a ‘radically material condition of human being that necessarily entails both the body and consciousness, objectivity and subjectivity into an irreducible ensemble’ (Sobchack 2004: 4).

Figure 1.1 Grand Fleet at Spithead Panorama, 1798

Hugely popular in Europe and the United States in the early nineteenth century, panoramas waxed and waned in public appeal throughout the century, finally fading from memory around the time that motion pictures ushered in an era ringing loudly with the sounds and sights of modernity (Wilcox 1988: 21). During their heyday, panoramas captured the imaginations of a wide swath of patrons, unlike easel painting, which largely appealed to the upper classes. Panoramas brought distant shores to European metropoles along with some of the architectural spoils of ancient antiquity. They were enormous billboards testifying to the visual proclivities of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century audiences; as befits the scope of this collection, panoramas provide us with a unique way of accessing the interface between popular culture, the legacy of colonialism, and immersive visual technologies. This chapter examines how an ethnographic way of seeing infused panoramic painting, a medium that sought to show off its mimetic prowess as well as vouch for the authenticity of the view and the credentials of the painter. Panoramas were not read or even made sense of as modes of ethnographic inscription (the discipline of anthropology was still nascent); but they performed some of the same discursive functions as other forms of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ethnographic representation (art objects, lithographs, native people’s themselves, and eventually photography and cinema). Panoramas thus offered a window onto distant cultures, especially when viewed alongside the text included in pull-out orientation maps that could be purchased for a shilling or less at the exhibition. These maps provided a key to discovering points of significance within the painting, and also described the cultural practices depicted.

Figure 1.2 Punch cartoon ‘The Monster Panorama Manias’, 1849

But what exactly were panoramas? Panoramas were enormous canvases suspended on the inside of cylindrical rotundas; spectators entered through the centre and walked around the belvedere (viewing platform) until they decided they had experienced the vast painting long enough and then descended the staircase to exit the building. In rare instances, two paintings would be exhibited in different locations in adjacent galleries within the same building, offering spectators the cinematic equivalent of a short subject before the main feature. An example of this can be seen in Figure 1.1, with a painting of Margate located on top of the main Grand Fleet panorama. Describing the exhibition set-up of panoramas does not, however, explain the nature of the viewing experience. Panoramas are phenomenologically complex sign systems, and helped spawn what art historian Shelly Rice calls a ‘panoramic consciousness’ in the nineteenth century, evidenced in such paintings as Caspar David Friedrich’s Moonrise Over the Sea from 1821, which includes two men ‘who have walked out onto the rocks extending into the sea so they can experience the thrill of being virtually encircled by the vast “panoramic” horizon line’ (Rice 1993: 70). In addition to influencing the fine arts (although paradoxically, panoramas were condemned by artists for their poor quality, as parodied in this 1849 cartoon from Punch (Figure 1.2), miniature panoramas came in innumerable shapes and sizes, including parlour toys and wall paper, and helped inspire a vibrant movement in panoramic photography.

The term panorama also entered the vernacular of the American literati, finding its way into Mark Twain’s 1883 Life on the Mississippi when Stephen, in a manic outburst, describes his friend Yates as being not just a picture, but a panorama: ‘Some call him a picture; I call him a panorama! That’s what he is – an entire panorama globe’ (Twain 1917: 159, emphasis added). Likewise, Edgar Allen Poe in his epic prose poem written in 1848 titled Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe, is quite at home with the term panorama in his discussion of the miniscule percentage of the earth’s entire circumference visible from a mountain top vantage point: in Poe’s words ‘the entire panorama would comprehend no more than one 40,000th part of the mere surface of our globe’ (Poe 1850: 190).

As ‘vehicles of personal and social fantasy,’ to quote Rice, ‘an escape from the spatial, temporal, and social limitations of [people’s] lives’ (1993: 70), panoramas were vibrant canvases upon which were projected the hopes and fantasies of an era. While many panoramas offered an elevated view of a distant natural landscape, as with the countless alpine and mountain-view panoramas, others evoked the idea of time travel to sites of antiquity. Animating the vast majority of nineteenth-century panoramas were notions of virtual travel, immersion, and the imagination of foreign peoples and scenes. A significant number of nineteenth-century circular and moving panoramas contain some ethnographic content, a sign of the obvious desire on the part of the artists (these were almost always collective endeavours), not simply to accurately reconstruct the landscape of exotic places, but to imbue such topography with a social and cultural life, to evoke its singularity as a place, event, or historical moment, often via a narrative device.

My goal in this chapter is to explore some of the diverse and distinctive ways panoramic painters constructed their ethnographic subjects. This is by no means an exhaustive account of ethnographic representation in panorama painting, but rather an attempt to widen the lens on the prehistory of visual anthropology, open up new spaces of investigation that can thicken our understanding of how images of non-Western subjects circulated in previously overlooked eras. Panorama painters drew upon both popular iconographic tropes as well as opening up less stable significatory spaces for the representation of native peoples. It is precisely these spaces of unstable meaning that make it possible to ‘look past’ contexts of colonial visualization, as Edwards and Morton (following Aird) point out in the Introduction to this book; to see panoramas as neither outside of colonial discourse, nor overdetermined by it, but somewhere in between. One possible way of beginning a conversation about panoramas and ethnographic representation is to consider whether panoramic vision itself created possibilities for making sense of cross-cultural difference along different epistemological axes (i.e. the affect of panoramic form on content). Did, for example, the inclusion of native peoples shift the cognitive and emotional register of the panorama, and were there differences between “incidental” modes of ethnographic knowledge, such as including a native person on the canvas synecdochally (to signify the location via costume and physical appearance) versus more ambitious attempts to use the circular or flat canvas to construct autochthonous knowledge (through the use of the orientation guides)? By untangling some of these modes and influences, this essay considers the panorama as a neglected (and somewhat unexpected) site of ethnographic imagery from the nineteenth century.

Our understanding of the panorama might also be enhanced by another informing context, that of medieval mapmaking, which I consider as an example of what J.B. Harley calls ‘the broader family of value-laden images’ (Harley 1988: 278). While the connection between map making and panoramas may appear tenuous, it is possible, as Harley points out, to make maps ‘“speak” about the social worlds of the past’ (Harley 1988). There are a great many correspondences: the panorama’s roots can be traced to mapmaking (as well as to landscape painting, Baroque painted ceilings/stage sets, as documented by Stephan Oettermann) since the panorama was initially developed as a topographical device that would assist in land surveys and planning for military manoeuvres (Pearson 1907: 8–18, Harley 1988: 277, Oettermann 1997: 5–48). Panoramas and mappaemundi were both peripatetic objects, moving between purpose-built rotunda in European cities in the case of panoramas and between royal dwellings and religious sites in the case of mappaemundi (Birkholz 2004: xviii). Mappaemundi and panoramas also both furthered the project of colonialism, and ‘offered richly coloured exotic experiences’, bringing the geographically remote closer to the spectator with such titles as View of Pompeii, View of Constantinople, and View of Lucknow (Wernick 1985: 69).

Medieval maps might be considered among the earliest modes of ethnographic representation, especially of the so-called “monstrous races”; as John Block Friedman argues in his canonical work on the monstrous in the Middle Ages: ‘the medieval taste for the exotic was in some ways comparable to our National Geographic interest in primitive and colourful societies today’. Friedman argues that it would be a mistake ‘to regard medieval maps as we do modern road maps or political atlases, for in the Middle Ages the map was far more a visual work of art and expression of contemporary cosmology and theology than it was an object of utility’ (Friedman 2000: 1, 38). The map that I will discuss here is the famous late thirteenth century Mappa Mundi housed in Hereford Cathedral, which resonates in unlikely yet significant ways with our understanding of panoramic vision and cross-cultural image-making. This extraordinary manuscript, a book in graphic form, is compelling testimony to the deep-seated fascination with mapping and documenting the world through an ethnographic lens.

Figures in the landscape: peopling the panorama

Discussion of the impact of human figures on the panoramic landscape appears regularly in reviews of paintings. For example, as late as 1886, one critic argued that despite the near perfection of the panorama’s illusionist powers – ‘on entering the exhibition room we find ourselves standing seemingly on a hill’ he writes – the spell was broken through the inclusion of people; in his words, ‘the introduction of figures really spoils the illusion [since] it is only when we find that the figures, though all in action, remain motionless, that we recognize how our senses were cheated in the first place’ (Anon. 1886: 45). Placing the blame squarely on the ‘more modern panoramas’, he argued that it was ‘in a great measure [to the absence of figures] that the most remarkable panorama of modern times owed its success’ (Anon. 1886: 47). If for this reviewer the inclusion of human figures compromised the panorama’s illusionism, he nevertheless strongly approved of the use of sound effects in the exhibition space, praising the Panorama of London installation at the Colosseum in Regent’s Park (Figure 1.3) for including ambient sound such as the ‘hum of the city’ and ‘street music by day and bell-ringing and clock-striking by night’ (Anon. 1886: 45). Given the sustained debate over the appropriateness of sound effects, human figures, and other attempts at heightening verisimilitude, the best we can surmise from the historical record is that while attempts by some artists to heighten realism through illusionistic effects were warmly welcomed by some critics, others found them inappropriate to the artistic integrity of panoramic vision.

While New York acquired its first permanent panorama rotunda in 1804, by the mid-1850s the moving (or peristrephic) panorama – a form well suited to the inclusion of narrativized ethnographic information on American Indian battles and cultural life – had assumed a hegemonic position in the United States. Organizing its vision quite differently to the circular panorama, the moving version consisted of a canvas suspended between two rollers (Figure 1.4), which would move gradually as it was unfurled before a seated audience (the painting could also be scrolled vertically, although this shift in perspective was reserved almost exclusively for the alpine genre). Panoramas with “Indian subjects” not only catered to a national interest in Anglo-Indian relations, furthering the racist discourse of Manifest Destiny and US expansionism, but also went down well with overseas audiences. The Sioux War Panorama, painted by John Stevens in 1868, redefined the 1862 Sioux uprising

Figure 1.3 Panorama of London at the Colosseum in Regent’s Park

Figure 1.4 Drawing illustrating the moving panorama winding mechanism, c. 1880s

as an ‘epic narrative of white innocence, Indian savagery, vulnerable nature, and death’ (Bell 1996: 279–80). Consisting of a series of separate panels, the painting exploits familiar oppositions between European and native dress and settlers versus indigenous communities, although the hybridity of the contact zone is also reflected in the mixing of European and Sioux clothing (Bell 1996: 291). Ultimately though, the painting functioned as a ‘propaganda performance that treated the elimination of Indians as an inevitable and ultimately reasonable consequence of American manifest destiny’² (Bell 1996: 286, 283).

Three of the most significant pioneers of the continuous view panorama in the US were John Banvard, John Rowson Smith, and Samuel A. Hudson, all of whom immersed themselves in their respective projects with zeal. Without wanting to push the analogy too far, one could argue that some panoramists approached their paintings with a quasi-anthropological desire for local knowledge; long before participant-observation become the methodological norm in anthropology, panorama artists were striving for topographical accuracy by making “drawings on the spot” (the discursive guarantee of authenticity of the view), studying local cultural features, including dwelling, dress, and diet, and ensuring that what appeared on the canvas measured up to its referent.

In addition to servicing discourses of American supremacy, native people authenticated the landscape, evoking its geocultural specificity both figuratively and ideologically. In the broadside for the lecture accompanying Dr. M.W. Dickeson’s 15,000 square foot canvas panorama titled Antiquities and Customs of the Unhistoried Indian Tribes, we are told that Dickeson had devoted 12 years of his life to studying Native American culture and collected over 40,000 artefacts. Painted by the artist I.J. Egan, the individual views and scenes were transcribed from ‘drawings made on...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I HISTORICIZING VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY
• PART II INSTITUTIONAL STRUCTURES
• PART III FIELDWORK
• PART IV INDIGENOUS HISTORIES
• Selected Reading
• Index