Viewing Souvenirs: Peepshows and the International Expositions - Notes
Viewing Souvenirs: Peepshows and the International Expositions
Introduction
This article explores the representation of international expositions in peepshow souvenirs.
Peepshows are folding paper devices offering a three-dimensional interior view.
It uses Walter Benjamin's idea of the world's fair as a phantasmagoria, suggesting optical souvenirs reinforced the enchanted visual experience unlike other souvenirs.
This reification impacts both popular consumption and collective memory.
International Expositions as Spectacles
International expositions during the industrial age were spectacles designed for visual education.
They showcased technology, people, and industrial commodities, drawing tourists to European capitals and Britain.
These events served to instill nationalism, taste, and consumption habits, while also providing entertainment.
Walter Benjamin, in his Passagen-Werk (Arcades Project), described world's fairs as a phantasmagoria offering distraction.
The phantasmagoria transforms physical elements into representations, affecting visual culture.
While the political and commodity aspects of expositions have been studied, the role of souvenirs in shaping social and optical effects has been less explored.
Peepshows allowed tourists to relive the exhibition's visual experience, thus reinforcing this phantasmagoria concept for both consumption and memory.
Phantasmagoria Defined
Benjamin uses 'phantasmagoria' to describe the deceptive nature of commodities and capitalism in the 19th century.
Building on Marx, Benjamin theorizes the visual and psychological impacts of capitalism on social life through this concept.
Phantasmagorias were also actual performances using magic lanterns to project spectral images in darkened rooms.
These images appeared three-dimensional but were illusions.
By the late 19th century, 'phantasmagoria' became more metaphorical than technological.
The Frankfurt School, including Benjamin, used the term to critique the illusory nature of commodities.
Benjamin connects dreamlike images to built spaces like shopping arcades and expositions, where viewers experience representations veiling social realities.
The phantasmagoria describes a conditioned relationship between viewers, commodities, and representations in the 19th century.
Optical Devices and Peepshows
Miniature optical images were common before international exhibitions.
Peepshows were popular in the late 18th and 19th centuries, featuring a small hole for viewing interior spaces lit with drawn or printed images.
These offered three-dimensional scenes of various subjects.
Peepshows gained popularity during the Enlightenment, serving both amusement and instruction with lenses, mirrors, and engravings.
Model theaters were similar devices capturing landscapes and interiors.
Peepshows appealed to both elites and popular audiences.
Traveling peepshow men presented images of exotic places and events with narrations at fairs.
By the early 19th century, elaborate boxes evolved into smaller, inexpensive devices for individual viewers, such as the polyorama panoptique and peep eggs.
The most common type used folding paper or linen bellows with lithographed or engraved scenes to create receding space illusions.
These could be stored flat and viewed privately.
Vision and the Observer
Jonathan Crary discusses the specificity of vision in observer production, noting the rise of optical devices in the early 19th century.
Paper peepshows, unlike other devices, did not have counterparts in empirical science but were related to printed scenic views.
The bourgeois peepshow observer inherited the perspective of a collector, viewing cities as objects in a kunstkammer.
Paper Peepshows in the 19th Century
Though no longer public attractions, paper peepshows maintained fair associations, depicting large-scale subjects such as engineering monuments and world's fairs.
The Thames Tunnel was a popular theme in the 1830s and 1840s.
Peepshows inverted the relationship with gigantic structures, transforming industrial technology feats into enchanted miniatures.
As souvenirs, they allowed the physical experience of the space to dissolve into a dreamlike memory.
The Great Exhibition of 1851
The Great Exhibition stimulated new "paper views," ordering the gaze to align with the Crystal Palace's vistas.
The Crystal Palace's design, like other monuments, lent itself to the impression of infinite recession.
Visitors encountered a magical space, associating it with a phantasm or fairy tale.
Representations emphasized the structure's luminous qualities and size.
Benjamin noted the oriental-fairy-tale style decorations.
Peepshow mementos further animated the exhibition's interior with three-dimensional illusions and light modulation.
Lithographic printing and hand-coloring created spectral authenticity.
Examples included views of Paxton's girders and Jones's color scheme, the Queen under her canopy, and crowds near colored goods.
Glass fragments simulated the glistening appearance of the "crystal" fountain.
Some designs featured a peepshow man revealing the peephole.
The disjunctive visual relationship between exterior and interior underscored how memory operates, transforming images into a haunting phantasmagoria.
The view through the peepholes often approximated a visitor's perspective.
The exterior of the Crystal Palace was shown as a massive presence on the horizon, with figures wandering inside.
The interior was portrayed as a dazzling universe encompassing world manufactures.
These views reinforced a way of understanding what was seen, giving a sensation of height, crowds, and displays.
Commodities and Consumer Desire
For Benjamin, commodities at world's fairs were fetishized objects of industrial capitalism and shimmering representations of consumer desire.
Exhibits stimulated consumption, but few items were for sale.
Benjamin noted that expositions trained the masses in empathy with exchange value, promoting visual consumption over physical interaction.
Elaborate exhibition pieces conveyed the commodity's abstract potential.
Thomas Richards argued that the Great Exhibition taught a shift towards phantasmagorical viewing, focusing on the direct perception of manufactured objects.
Souvenir Views
As expositions and tourism connected, entrepreneurs provided souvenirs like maps and guidebooks.
Collectible images of buildings were available for tourists.
Souvenirs followed in this tradition, showing fair buildings in perspective on items like scarves and fans.
The scale of the exposition was inverted, making it both ephemeral and monumental.
Panoramic Perspectives
The grand view was a favorite theme for souvenirs.
Nadar's photographs from a balloon offered a panoramic perspective of the 1867 Paris exhibition.
Visitors came to world's fairs for goods and vistas.
Ascending the Eiffel Tower in 1889 became a quintessential fair experience.
Guidebooks likened the view to panoramas of ancient cities.
The impression of confusion could be simulated in moveable souvenirs.
Pop-ups showed buildings in impossible arrangements, removed from their context.
Souvenirs are fragmentary, offering a viewpoint that represents the whole experience.
Miniaturization makes the abstract visual experience collectible.
Optical souvenirs transcend the experience of the mobile observer.
Peepshow souvenirs are both commodities and illusory optical experiences.
Peepshows vs. Other Souvenirs
Illustrated catalogs, albums, and maps were also souvenirs.
Peepshows ensured continued viewing of the exhibition.
Unlike multi-volume catalogs, peepshows isolated the viewer, directing the gaze towards individual buildings and subjective experience.
Albums gave object details, while peepshows favored visual impression.
The Act of Looking
World's fair peepshows thematized the act of looking.
Tony Bennett suggested that the 'exhibitionary complex' turned viewing dynamics back on itself, making the crowd a self-regulating spectacle.
Peepshows rendered the crowd in separate planes, producing an appearance of casual disorder.
The peepshow provided an idealized impression of visual effects and social dynamics.
The world collapsed into a miniature bourgeois version of itself.
Positioned outside looking in, the viewer trained a gaze on the world with objective distance.
Optical Amusements
Peepshows flourished alongside the diorama, panorama, and magic lantern.
While panoramas projected realistic illusions, peepshows offered a manipulated vision.
The sequential arrangement of cards made peepshows static viewing devices.
Jonathan Crary suggests that 'realistic' vision became dominant from the 1830s.
Stereoscopes offered animated appearances, while peepshows focused on the middle ground.
Peepshows couldn't match the realism and mechanical complexity of the stereoscope.
Stereoscopic views gained popularity, offering more lifelike experiences.
Even as peepshows shifted to folding pop-ups, they remained scenic.
Newer technologies like photography made the 'phantasmagoric' effect accessible.
The Phantasmagoric Illusion & Peepshows
The desire for phantasmagoric illusion and peepshow souvenirs flourished alongside international expositions.
Peepshows offered a perspective that turned the entire exhibition into a spatial phantasmagoria.
As 'realistic' images increased, peepshows became viewed as children's entertainment.
However, prints show both adults and children using them, indicating it wasn't always relegated to children.
Souvenirs, Memory, & Time
The souvenir authenticates a past experience while discrediting the present.
World's fairs celebrated contemporary achievements and imagined a better future while also romanticizing the past.
Historical surveys and reconstructed villages aimed at showing progress while evoking nostalgia.
The peepshow also implicated this discourse of nostalgia.
Viewers could experience the fair as past and present.
The inclusion of strolling figures reinforced timelessness.
The apparatus of the peepshow heightened the perception of space transcending time.
Specific events became subsumed into an illusory world.
Peepshows at fairs summed up the complex experience as firmly part of a history of historical events and as a statement of confidence in the present.
The 1939 New York World's Fair Peepshow
Designed to represent time itself, it featured a jester offering the view to George and Martha Washington.
Looking into 'the world of tomorrow,' viewers encountered the fair's emblems: the Trylon and Perisphere.
The peepshow represented the continuum of 150 years, from Washington's inauguration to 1939.
It directed the gaze from the past towards the future, obscuring details or uncertainties.
Conclusion
The emphasis on visuality at world's fairs was ideological.
'To see is to know' was associated with expositions.
Peepshows evidenced visual popular culture and the relationship between spectators, expositions, and memory.
Peepshow souvenirs demonstrated how miniaturization made the fair consumable and memorable.
They exemplified Benjamin's observations on capitalism's effects.
The international exposition miniaturized the globe, offering a phantasmagoria, and peepshows became apt souvenirs of this experience.
Spectators consumed information as amusement through this lens.
Peepshows presented a broader vista into the study of culture.