Starting with an overview of the International View Company and its founder, we provide background information on the creator of the stereographs in question and elaborate on the major companies from the stereograph industry. After exploring the popular uses of stereographs, we transition to the dark contents of stereographic images that made the medium so popular, demonstrating that comedy often meant the exploitation of racial and sexist stereotypes.

Producers of Stereographs and the Market
In 1899, Charles Lincoln (C.L.) Wasson moved to Decatur, Illinois and founded the International View Company. Wasson was a photographer and captured various subjects, including the Boer War in South Africa, the San Francisco Earthquake, the St. Louis World's Fair, and the inauguration of William McKinley. Likewise, the International View Co. produced a wide range of stereographs, including comedic, natural, cultural, travel, educational, and documentary images. The company produced originals that were taken by Wasson himself, but the company also hired photographers or purchased photographs to republish. The stereoscopic pictures presented in this edition were taken by A.S. Campbell. He was a photographer based out of New Jersey and sold his images to producers like International View Company.

Stereographs had a relatively short life-cycle in the public eye. Initially, entrepreneurs were hopeful that stereographs would dominate the photographic market and make the old two-dimensional approach obsolete. Over time, as they became mass-market items, stereographs became quite affordable. A 100-piece set of stereographs from Britannica that cost $189 in 1879 only cost $16.67 less than two decades later. By the late 1920s, the golden age of stereoscopes came to a close. Silent films and postcards became the prominent forms of entertainment media. The public began to see stereographs as dull, and interest declined. When the Great Depression hit, the combination of a declining interest in stereographs, and a failing economy caused the last big producer of stereographs to halt production of stereoscopic images in 1939.

Applications of Stereographs
Stereographs were often used as educational tools. Early on in the technology’s development, companies presented the stereograph as an “instrument that created a more valuable representation of the physical world than the human eyes produced."  A dramatic example of this concept was a stereographic image of the moon published in 1857 by Warren De La Rue. By taking two pictures of the moon months apart, he was able to create a virtual model of the moon that viewers could see in 3D. In 1907, Keystone Viewing Company created its first “teachers’ guide” which was sold alongside a 600 piece stereograph set.

The more popular use of stereographs, however, was as parlor entertainment. Hosts and visitors would gather together in the common areas and exchange these small images. The contents often depicted what historian Martha Sandweiss has called the ‘public photograph’: a staged image that “depicted scenes and people of broad interest or visual jokes that appealed widely and were understood within American culture.” The ‘public photograph's reliance upon racist and sexist stereotypes suggest that these beliefs were widespread in society and an effective marketing strategy for garnering consumer interest.

Commercializing Racism
Perhaps the most frequent trope in stereographs was that of derisive or offensive portrayals of African-Americans. For example, “the St. Louis Beef Canning Company issued a series of advertising trade cards in the 1880s which revealed these views. These cards show blacks with big mouths, big ears, oversized hands and feet, sloping foreheads (meant to indicate limited intelligence), and behaving in exaggerated and ridiculous fashion.” These exaggerated caricatures became the stereotype that consumers looked to purchase. The stereotype became a part of popular culture and, “[p]opular culture presented Negroes as comic figures in the period from the late nineteenth century on, and the black figure shouldered aside many other ethnic types to become the most popular comic character for a time.” Continued reproduction of these stereotypes strengthened white Americans’ belief in them as fact. When postcards hit the market in 1893, they became wildly popular with some of their best-selling items being stereotyped images of blacks. However, what postcards did that minstrel shows and black-face could not was cement stereotypes by the ways of ‘photographic evidence’. While photos for postcards were staged, consumers often incorrectly interpreted them as tangible evidence that supported their ideas of white superiority. These stereotypes in the images would draw comic responses out of people. This type of response demonstrated that early photographic humor helped shape the cultural identity of photography and defined the medium’s relationship to a predominantly white bourgeois public.

In one of our images, "Cleanliness is next to Godliness," we see an African-American woman bathing a young African-American boy who is presumably her son, while an older man (perhaps the father) looks on, holding an oversized scrub brush. The depiction of the home draws upon racialized classist images, in which the walls remain bare, the furniture sparse, piping exposed, and a large wooden bucket and pitcher as the primary instruments of bathing. The content of the image, by focusing on the bathing process, reifies the upper-middle class' belief in a correlation between poverty, blackness, and slovenliness.

The next image, "Spare the Rod and Spoil the C**n," depicts the same presumed family: a mother spanks her son with a rod while the father watches. The popular saying, "spare the rod, spoil the child," suggests that violent punishment teaches children discipline, and that withholding the "rod" leads to a coddled child. The racial epithet here is particularly revealing; the term "c**n" insinuates centuries of slavery, subjugation, and the persistence of a racial hierarchy well into Reconstruction. Yet, taken as a whole, the image and its title suggests even more than a racial hierarchy: it speaks to the larger belief that African Americans must be disciplined, often violently, to "know" their place within the white-dominated power structure.
 

In another image, “Dat’s Ours,” a black man and woman are featured who are both presumed servants. The comic view plays on the speech as well as the pride these individuals appear to be showing in posing next to what appears to be an expensive cake. The title is a direct reference to black speech and how it is viewed as incorrect or improper by white Americans. The derogatory mocking of African-Americans’ speech – as well as culture, appearance, dance, and character – was commonly seen in minstrel shows. Performers in the first minstrel shows in the 1830s wore tattered clothing and imitated enslaved Africans on Southern plantations. White performers reduced African-Americans to caricatures portrayed as “lazy, ignorant, superstitious, hypersexual, and prone to thievery and cowardice” in these shows. Black-face and minstrelsy “formed the basis of a definitive culture of inexpensive entertainment at a time when a national American culture had not yet coalesced.” The mass production and sale of items such as stereographs and postcards, however, began to homogenize a popular culture in America. The producers of these items expanded on the stereotypes which were built by decades of hatred. White Americans separated themselves from African-Americans by mocking their appearance, speech, and culture.

Sexism in Stereographs
Another common comic theme drew upon the sexual politics of the home. During this period, middle- and upper-class women were limited to domestic roles within their home due to being financially and socially dependent on their husbands. Perhaps as a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the confines of matrimony, themes of infidelity were used as a set-up to a visual joke, which we can see in “Mrs. Smith is Out.” and “But Mrs. Smith Returns Unexpectedly.” Here, Mrs. Smith catches her husband in an extramarital affair with their maid. Though stereographs showed wives being unfaithful as well, when the subject involved the husband getting caught, the wife’s reaction reflected her matronage and tended to be moralizing and involved punishing the husband.

These two images draw upon another common Victorian popular culture trope: the perceived sexual availability of the lower class, especially of female domestic servants. “Kissing the servant girl” was presented as an innocent act, and a staple of farce, cartooning, and erotic photography of the time.

Historian Melody Davis argues that these images gloss over “real social inequities, desperate lack of opportunities for women, and the potential of abuse for those working in another’s house.” Furthermore, these images leaned on ethnic as well as gender stereotypes. Domestic servitude in the 1800s was linked with an influx of Irish immigrants to the United States. An estimated three million women emigrated from Ireland during this time. By the 1860s in New York, about 80% of employed Irish women found work as domestic servants. The white upper class found the Irish inferior or uncouth, and these stereotypes of this new immigrant group made their way into popular culture and media depiction. All Irish women were known as “Bridget” or “Biddy” for short, while men were known as “Patrick” or “Paddy". A common image was “How Biddy Served the Tomatoes Undressed.” In fact, every major publisher carried a “Biddy scene,” the earliest dating back to 1891.

Our edition contains two such scenes: “Biddy, You May Serve the Tomatoes Undressed” and “Biddy Serving the Tomatoes Undressed.” The latter acts as the punchline. ‘Biddy’ serves the tomatoes in her undergarments, the joke being that she is too ignorant to understand what dressing food means, and too naïve to understand why being “undressed” herself is improper.

These stereographs demonstrate the interrelated nature of class, gender, and race in the white American imagination. Classism set the backdrop of the racist and sexual images that many members of the American public unquestioningly consumed. Ultimately, stereographs both mirrored Americans' beliefs in a specific racial and gender order, and further naturalized those beliefs well into the twentieth century.