Looking Backward: A Photographic Portrait of the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century

by Michael Lesy

A transporting work of photographic history that offers a haunting vision of how Americans viewed the world at the dawn of the twentieth century. In 1900 the stereograph was king. Its three-dimensional optics created a virtual presence for the viewer. Millions of Americans, especially schoolchildren, absorbed ideas about race, class, and gender from such 3D images, the embodiment of the notion that “seeing is believing.” Drawing on an enormous, rarely seen collection of some 300,000 stereographic views spanning the first decade of the twentieth century, Michael Lesy presents nearly 250 images displaying a riot of peoples and cultures, stark class divisions, and unsettling glimpses of daily life a century ago. Like Lesy’s landmark works of American macabre, Wisconsin Death Trip and Murder City , Looking Backward slides the reader into suspended animation. Haunting views of the early twentieth century’s most significant events at home and in the farthest reaches of the world―war, rebellion, industrial revolution, and natural catastrophe―flank pictures of the last remnants of the premodern natural world. Lesy’s evocative essays reassert the primacy of the stereograph in American visual history. He profiles the photographers who saw the world through their prejudices and the companies that sold their images everywhere. In underscoring the unnerving parallels between that period and our own, Looking Backward reveals a history that shadows us today. 233 duotone photographs

Genres: Photography, History

256 pages, Hardcover

Published April 18, 2017

About the author

Michael Lesy’s books include Angel’s World and Long Time Coming. In 2006 he was named one of the first United States Artists Fellowship recipients, and in 2013 was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. A professor of literary journalism at Hampshire College; he lives in Massachusetts.

Reviews

[John Cooper · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book isn't what I thought it was. Perhaps unjustifiably, but understandably (I hope), I expected a collection of photographs that would illuminate and vivify the the nineteen-oughts the way that Lesy's Long Time Coming illuminated the period between 1935 and 1943, showing the life of ordinary people doing ordinary things. But instead of presenting a slice of life, Lesy here has preferred images that he feels illuminate the present: disaster, warfare, extremes of poverty and wealth. There are also many original captions and educational texts that are included because of their shocking racism. And they really do shock, even for well-read, jaded history buffs such as me.

The photographs were originally stereographs: fully three-dimensional images intended to be viewed with a special device. This was big business for a while, and it's worthwhile to reflect how much power these images must have had to people who, in contrast to we moderns, were not exposed to thousands of images every day on screens, but only the few presented to them on commercial signs, in newspapers and magazines, in uncommonly encountered illustrated books, and perhaps at movie theaters a few times a month. A 3-D image must have often produced gasps, even when they did not show decaying bodies with missing limbs or the neck stumps of beheaded prisoners, as some of these do.

To my history-nerd sensibilities, the book's greatest strength lies in the text, not the images. At the beginning, and especially between chapters, Lesy explains the origin of the stereograph and how for a few decades it was the biggest media sensation of its era. It's a forgotten history magnificently explained, mixed together with Lesy's own meditations on history and progress and the contrast between the past and the present moment. Lesy is as excellent a writer as he is an archivist, and although the project would be uncommercial, I wish he'd written a book about the stereograph instead of this shock-and-awe image collection.

[Paula · Rating 3 out of 5]

I gave this 3 stars. It's hard to say you liked a book when some of the photos, in fact a lot of the photos are just gruesome. Yes, they are amazing photos, but very upsetting to look at, for some people, including me.

I actually didn't realize what this book would encompass when I ordered it. For some reason, I thought it would be more photos of cities or places, not mainly people, and for the most part very, very indigent people. It was hard to look at some of those faces and to notice the lack of proper clothing, shoes, etc. And the war photos were often very brutal.

Technically, the photography is amazing, and the photos certainly give the viewer a clear look at some very hard times and lives of that era.

[Kevin A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Lesy’s essays can sometimes leave me baffled. His Wisconsin Death Trip I find both fascinating and irritating in equal measure. Here the usual abstract philosophical questions and big thoughts seem more comprehensible. Intellectual tangents are more fully tethered to the objects in question — and what objects they are! Crisply reproduced images originally taken by stereographic companies between 1900-1910. As usual, Lesy is drawn to the weird, brutal and tragic. The period captions, not surprisingly, represent the biases and ideas of a century ago. But they are also fascinating.

[Jerstyn Morehay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superlative title-look back at the stereoscopic output of two merging educational/journalistic photographs companies in the first decade of the twentieth century. Michael Lesy invites viewers through his organizing of stills and text to consider the stereoscopes from a variety of points of view, most intriguingly from the historical limitations of both the original photographers and viewers.

[Leonard · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of black and white photos with some text, many of the photos of war and poverty with suffering people, that are finely reproduced in the pages of this attractive and informative volume.

[kerrycat · Rating 4 out of 5]

stunning photographs - some are rather disconcerting, as they should be.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating look at the world through early 20th Century eyes.