A Mutual Space? Stereo Photography on Viennese Anthropological Expeditions (1905–45)

Abstract

Vienna’s major expeditions of mostly physical anthropology have left a substantial, but largely ignored, stereo photographic legacy. This chapter looks into how each of these expeditions exploited particular qualities of the three-dimensional medium to accommodate the successive anthropological concepts of salvage, atavism, hereditary segregation and total capture. Tracing how these “spaces of knowledge” were developed from being a means of visual documentation in the field to a promising instrument of scientific analysis in the aftermath, Matiasek suggests their reading as one overarching experimental enterprise towards a tangible rasterization of mankind. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the immersive medium’s agency to transcend its contexts of construction and become a mutual space between scientific observer and stereoscopic subject today—vacillating between cosmopolitan representation and local presence.