Enami in Cosplay: Left Eye, Looking In, Figure

The example of Enami’s self-portrait presents stereomimesis in a nutshell by juxtaposing his mode of production (selling the “real Japan” through stereoscopy) with his impersonation of a samurai in the photograph (offering a carefully constructed artifice through his mimicry). The stereograph market involved a mix of European and American visitors, Japanese consumers, and armchair travelers around the world. After the first wave of photographic images from Japan (largely taken by Westerners or their often-uncredited Japanese assistants) from 1850 to 1890, the photograph market was renewed by the influx of stereographic images of Japan. The images produced for that market demonstrate that Western primitivism and orientalism was matched in Japan not only with Japanese versions of those aesthetic systems but also with a nostalgia for a premodern, fetishistically longed-for past, imagined as refined and pastoral.

Enami participated in a global network of trade in stereoscopic photographs of Japan. As part of a vibrant photography community in Yokohama, he trained under Ogawa Kazumasa in the 1880s and joined the Photographic Society of Japan on March 22, 1890.13 From 1892 to 1926, he ran a studio on Benten dōri (his son would later take over, running it from 1929 to 1938).14 This shop was named one of only seven recognized studios for tourists and collectors in Japan in 1904. Enami was awarded a silver medal at the 1905 Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Liège.15 He embedded with Japanese forces during the Russo-Japanese War and documented battles and victory poses with both stereographs and glass lantern slides.16 He also traveled beyond the Japanese Empire, processing photos from Manila, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin. He published several stunning photos in National Geographic in the 1920s under his own name.17 After his original studio burned down in the 1923 earthquake, Enami successfully litigated to receive owed payment from Raphael Eduard Liesegang, heir to the Liesegang magic lantern and photography factory in Düsseldorf, who had ordered and received 1,080 lantern slides (totaling 677 yen and 80 sen) from Enami prior to the war.18 His talents were touted to the president of the National Geographic Society, Gilbert H. Grosvenor, by photographer Sakamoto Kiyoshi in a letter dated September 11, 1928, preparing Grosvenor for his trip to Japan: “I like Enami best especially for developing your own films. He is thoroughly trustworthy.”19 And thanks to the studious work of Rob Oechsle, Enami continues to be thought of as the “foremost producer of Japanese stereo view scenes.”20 Despite this formidable commercial and professional information and his photographic legacy, not much is known about Enami as an individual or thinker. He left behind no diaries or collections of letters. He did not write any treatise on stereoscopy, guidebook on the aesthetics of composition and color, or essay on good business practices. So from scant resources—the foreground minutiae of his photographic legacy and the broader background discourse on photography and stereography—we can only conjecture the middle ground, what he thought about stereoscopy as a medium.

Such photography studios as Enami’s commonly provided photos of Japan to foreigners and tourists, as well as played a memorial and documentary role for Japanese people seeking to commemorate important life moments. Cameras were still a new enough technology that they were not yet widely circulating at the mass consumer level; they were mostly in the hands of professionals who then charged a hefty price for their products. Their studios also typically offered foreigners and locals the opportunity to have their portraits taken, sometimes in local garb or historical costumes. A 1902 English-language advertisement for Enami’s studio in Japan Directory promotes “Views and Costumes of Japan,” in addition to enlargements, portraits, stereoscopic views, and lantern slides.21 The photographic record shows Enami’s customers in kimonos, armor, and yukata. This market for dress-up or cosplay as masquerade celebrates the past.

Enami’s eye for nostalgia extended beyond his studio to his outdoor, on-location landscape photos. His most stunning, colorful, and stereotypical magic lantern slides were single images, originally selected from a stereograph, depicting small groups of people (between two and five) in front of some impressive background. Enami was skilled at capturing the already stereotypical views of Japan, not only through stereoviews of landscapes featuring Mount Fuji, bridges, and local flora but also through figures populating those landscapes: farmers, students, artisans, geisha, tattooed laborers, wrestlers, and samurai. And, indeed, according to stereograph historian and theorist Jonathan Crary, the positioning of figures in the middle ground with a landscape in the background is typical of stereography as a medium.22 Enami’s compositional practice in nature exemplifies Crary’s theorization about the medium writ large.

Enami’s stereo-self-portrait captures two gazes: one, an imperialist or anthropological gaze of a Western viewer that desires connection with the world and the other (a gaze at the stereograph), and another, his gaze-back that punctures or pierces the two-dimensional plane, seeming to hit back at the viewer.23 The trick of this photograph is that the foreign corporations to which Enami sold the stereograph probably had little idea that what they were seeing was anything less than an authentic Japan. They were not completely wrong. After all, what could be more authentic than a photographer’s self-portrait? Yet, the anonymity of the model had to be maintained for the photo to be representative of Japan in the form of its “ancient warrior” rather than a specific person. A more recent photographer’s costumed self-portraits present an inversion of Enami’s photo. In Cindy Sherman’s self-portraiture in masquerade (and doubly so for Yasumasa Morimura’s self-impersonations of Sherman), the inclusion of the self in disguise is subversive.24 The same might be said of the transcritical, acti-passivity of Enami’s cosplay. But Sherman’s photos of herself impersonating famous, iconic, or archetypal women of popular culture are subversive because we know they are self-portraits. Her gaze confounds ours because as photographer she is in more control of the image than is typical for a model. Conversely, Enami’s self-portraiture is so gripping because it was a secret not to be opened for decades. Nevertheless, his masquerade is incomplete; rather than submitting to the structure of the gaze, he confounds us with his look, a pose of military might.25 And yet, does any sense of presence or frisson emanating from the photo originate in the gaze depicted within it or the exterior knowledge of whose visage it captures?

At the time of its initial circulation, the Enami photo was trading on what Daniel Novak highlights as the “alienation, anonymity, fragmentation, and abstraction” of nineteenth-century photography. Novak argues that the labor of the human bodies or models framed in early photography is abstracted in the same way that capitalism more broadly abstracts labor from workers: “Using the technology of ‘realism,’ these photographers produced new and fictional bodies that existed only in a photographic space. In other words, the technology of realism produced what appears to be its opposite: the nonexistent, the fictional, and the abstract.”26 Of course, this composite of documentation and artifice, fact and fiction, might be evident in all photographs, but it is particularly salient in the stereo exemplar above. That is, Enami entered the capitalist marketplace by abstracting his own labor as a model in order to make himself into the anonymous likeness of other such samurai images already circulating. Abstraction mattered, and Enami was a master of economimesis, at once a salesman and a master artist. The model being the photographer (controlling the means of production) does not necessitate or determine that the photo could transcend the structure of the gaze. But our knowledge of the doubled role adds an extra perspective to the photo. Viewing this stereograph as connected to both a desire for ancient Japan and the modern moment of the photo studio is a way of grasping the reality of Enami’s predicament.

Enami was caught between at least two worlds. For instance, there was, on the one hand, the market that wanted him to vanish and provide a transparent view of Japan and, on the other, his own artistry and craft that sought beauty and affect. Baudrillard writes that “the photographer too has disappeared” in photography and that “there is indeed a symbolic murder that is part of the photographic act. But it is not simply the murder of the object. On the other side of the lens, the subject too is made to disappear.”27 Here, he is really blind to the other eye that might also see the birth of the modern split subject in that very disappearing of the unified subject. With the studio and his face, plain as day in the photographs, always awaiting discovery or recovery, Enami drew on anonymity and self-abstraction to incompletely disappear; he cannot hide, just as viewers of the stereograph never escape the fact of their own gazing.

In a way, Enami achieves through this stereomimesis the position that Donna Haraway advocates in her feminist deconstruction of what she calls the “god-trick” of “infinite vision” associated with the Cartesian male gaze in effect in so much photography. Haraway insists on the embodiment of the gaze to counter the very illusion of a “conquering gaze from nowhere,” an “infinitely mobile vision,” the position of “seeing everything from nowhere.” She writes, “That view of infinite vision is an illusion, a god-trick.” In its place she proposes “insisting metaphorically on the particularity and embodiment of all vision.”28 Rather than a disembodied technological or institutional gaze, Enami, by inserting himself into the frame, perpetrates a doubled embodiment: as the photographer, he is the gazer; as the model, he is the gazed upon. And there is even more to it than that: as the model, he redirects his own gaze; as photographer he directs ours back at himself and his viewers. So here stereoscopy is marking not only a nostalgia for a past Japan but also a longing for a unified subject (which is, of course, always already in absentia). What is captured in Enami’s self-portrait is the tension between the pose of passively presenting the reality of ever-vanishing history and the present reality of actively cultivating a mythic past.

The story of Enami’s self-portrait presents an alternative to the gazer/gazed upon binary set out by a common narrative of the imperial photographic encounter with the other, which imagines that native people have a binary choice “either to be the victim of imperialist reality, or to play their allotted role in the white man’s fantasy.”29 Enami declines to choose, instead playing the “allotted role” of Japanese as other to “the West” while simultaneously learning to inhabit that new world through the technology of the other. He became both the victimizing holder of the gaze and its subject. As the gazed-upon subject, Enami was not simply turning the gaze back on the viewer but recasting the gaze as much for a Japanese audience as for the world. This constant shifting—for us, between eyes, and for Enami, between being the framer of the shot and the object of the shot—allows for an alternative positionality of the split subject that is fundamentally modern. Stereomodernism here lies in the constructed, virtual reality of his self-portrait, at the nexus between the real and the imaginary, between new media and old tradition, between 2D and 3D, between east and west, between left eye and right, between gazing in at the self and out at the world. The perspective provided by Enami’s landscapes and figures is not so much that of the solipsistic Cartesian worlds of erasing the I/eye of the beholder but the staging of the I/eye of the subject as in the functioning of the panorama and diorama.

The Panoramic Stereoscope: Right Eye, Gazing Out, Ground

A regular advertisement that ran in the Asahi newspaper several times from the fall of 1902 through the following year announced a “major invention of photology that will astound!” (odoroku beki kōsengakujō no daihatsumei), “an even greater product than the ordinary panorama photos and panorama stereoscopes [panorama jittai kyō] used in typical classrooms.” The advertisement for “the automatic panoramic peep-o-scope” (panorama jidō nozoki-kyō) called it “a novel curiosity [zanshin chinki] about to become a craze.” The machine in question was akin to August Fuhrmann’s massive stereoscopic Kaiserpanorama (ca. 1880) but closer to another viewing device, patented by William Reeves in 1897, that, for a few coins, would automatically flip through a series of stereoscopic images at a set pace for one viewer at a time.30 This newspaper ad was aimed not at viewers but rather at proprietors of businesses who might allocate a space in their shops or businesses for the automated entertainment/amusement machine, promising “a reliable daily revenue of 12 yen for the collection of funds for schools to educate poor children or for orphanage charities. . . . A money maker beyond expectations.” The advertisement concludes with a call for interested readers to request a detailed mail-order pamphlet, offering “regional special contracts for individual sales” of this “innovative and unusual automatic money profit machine.” Here the economy of mimesis (the zero-sum game between nature and artifice that Derrida describes) is superimposed on the entertainment economy, as views automatically provided by the device (in a closed system of representation and mimicry) become a source of revenue.

This type of viewing apparatus was neither popular nor long-lasting, but it exposes something important about that moment in the history of mass visual media in Japan: for a brief time, the private, solitary viewing of stereoscopy and the public experience of the panorama hall were linked through the public installation of this kind of vending-machine viewer. This apparatus seems to have been available in various forms from roughly 1897 to 1916, and in nearly every instance the relationship between panorama and stereoscope was part of the marketing. This link between panorama and stereoscope provides a key to understanding how such media transformed cityscapes.

By the late nineteenth century, photography had become familiar, losing some of its early allure as a spectacle. But that sense of excitement would be renewed by both the stereoscopic photography boom from the 1890s through the First World War and the new mechanized viewing machines that proliferated during the same period. Though the name of the coin-operated “panorama stereoscope” suggests a fusion of two seemingly antipodal optical affordances, what it reveals is that what seems like two forms with two different functions today were considered more closely associated then. At one level, the fusion can be seen as a brilliant marketing strategy. What seems at first blush to be inaccurate nomenclature reflects an effort not only to capture the burgeoning Japanese market for binary vision devices and viewing opportunities offering a three-dimensional perspective but also to tap into the well-known and much-discussed urban architectural destination for visual spectacle, the panorama hall. But at another level, the broader discourse around such devices reveals structural and functional similarities. In addition, the unity in the naming of these visual regimes in this kind of device reveals much about the capacious definitions around stereoscopic photography during the first decade and a half of the twentieth century. Further, the fact that “the panorama stereoscope” is linked to the rise of the vending machine in Japan shows how the machine’s mediation and dissemination of realistic and fantastic images is as important as its mediation of commerce.

As stereography lost some of its sense of novelty both in Japan and abroad by the turn of the twentieth century, new efforts began to revitalize the experience of stereoscopy. In the United States, the Keystone Stereoview Company sought to charge the medium with an educational role, for instance, by printing a “Descriptive Text for Stereographs and Lantern Slides” to accompany the series A Scenic Tour of Japan (1905). At the same time in Japan, the stereograph was being reinvigorated with the tinge of new spectacle through photographic reporting on the Russo-Japanese War. This push to capture newsworthy events visually has its own history. At once the result of the stereomimetic technique of documentation or recording as well as one of spectacle and spectacularization learned from the popularity of violent panoramas imported to Japan a generation after the U.S. Civil War in the 1890s, 2D war photography was also the legacy of a generation of photographers like K. Ogawa (Enami’s teacher), who sold several photo collections of the previous decade’s military encounter in China.31 Such photographic mediations of the latest war afforded the next generation of photographers like Enami a new opportunity to document and, indeed, produce the visual discourse on the latest war. As part of a burgeoning military-industrial complex, Enami traveled to the front to earn money by taking war photos as an embedded photographer.

In addition to the renewal of the media through the incorporation of timely content, the technology of the medium itself was ripe for a reboot. By 1902, there was already something old and nostalgic about the stereograph as a medium (the double photos mounted on cards) and the stereoscope as a gadget (the handheld viewers). Both had been introduced in Japan by 1862 and circulated there more widely in the 1870s, but they really became a consumer form in the 1890s, when photographers like Enami first began to mass-produce and market them.32 An advertisement for the Katsugakan photo shop in Kanda, Tokyo, carried in the July 2, 1902, issue of the Yomiuri Shinbun emphasizes the astounding representation of the already aging media, claiming that “the true images of figures vibrantly appear before your eyes” and “one glance is worth a thousand”; yet, the advertisement, even as it celebrates the format, seems to protest too much in the image it presents. A print rendering of a stereographic photograph of a traditional landscape subject for woodblock prints and labeled “Fuji from Suruga” adorns the top of the advertisement, which also features other print images of two different stereoscopic viewing apparatuses along with the word Stereoscope as an English gloss over sōgan shashin (literally, “binocular photographs”). Because widespread adoption of photostatic reproduction in newspapers was still a decade away, using a double image print etching of Mount Fuji to represent a stereoscopic photograph was necessary. Here, the new media is sold through the old medium, which cannot quite capture the effect, so it resorts to the textual rhetoric of realism in representation and appeal through the use of one of the most traditional landscape vistas imaginable—the national, natural symbol of Fuji, a medium for conjuring the myth of nation—as a totem pole stands in a village center for conjuring a dead family.33 The cognitive dissonance between the advertisement’s claims about the stereograph’s vibrant and new representations and the means by which this can be reproduced in the remediated form of the newspaper reveals not just a gap between new and old media (stereography and newsprint) but also two basic problems of stereography: first, that it was difficult to circulate widely because it required a stereoscope, and second, that it was to be populated with remediated nostalgic images like the national icon. Or, in short, the advertisement is both a sign of troubles of a stereograph market that was ripe for a renewal and a meager attempt to renew it.

That renewal would come in both content and form. The medium of the panorama hall (a circular building for viewing an expansive painting on the walls, which gave a sense of 360-degree immersion in the landscape of the painting when viewed from the center) had circulated globally in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It was an immediate success in Japan, with panorama halls springing up across Tokyo and over forty halls built nationwide in the twenty years after the 1890 opening of the Ueno Panorama Hall.34 Memorialized by literati (such as Mori Ōgai, Hagiwara Sakutarō, and Edogawa Rampo, among many others) who wrote about the enchanting experience and bewildering effects of the spectacle, the panorama halls became so exceedingly popular that they, in turn, spawned spin-off gadgets.

In addition to the panorama halls, the German Kaiserpanorama also transformed and renewed the stereographic media. It is not clear whether the “panoramic stereoscope” devices bear any direct lineage from August Fuhrmann’s 1883 invention (patented in 1888) for between ten and twenty-five people to view an automatically advancing series of stereographs or from a similar coin-operated device (patented by William Reeves in 1897) for one person to view a series of stereographs over a set period. But there seem to have been at least circuitous connections. The Kaiserpanorama was popular and well known throughout Germany, and penny arcades were all the rage in the United States at a time when many Japanese officials, students, and other technological appropriators visited the West specifically in order to glean the latest innovations. Most technological and visual apparatuses developed in Europe and America found their way into the Japanese technical literature of the time, though there is no mention of the Kaiserpanorama until 1902, nearly two decades after its invention.35 And some Japanese content appeared in the German Kaiserpanorama soon after: a series of more than forty Russo-Japanese War stereographs, some colored in the Enami studio’s style, were exhibited in the Wilhelmshaven Kaiserpanorama in April 1906 and remain in the Deutsches Historisches Museum’s Kaiserpanorama collection.36 Back in Japan, Kimura Kōseikan’s April 1904 advertisement for a panoramic stereoscope (see Figure 6, center) touted the fact that the machine would exhibit binocular photos (sōgan shashin) from the Russo-Japanese War in Asakusa (near one of the famed panorama halls) for ten days in May.37 So it would seem that the histories of war stereography, public panorama, and machinic viewing were at the least nearly simultaneous, if not mutually constitutive. Even if divergent evolution cannot explain the similarity with Fuhrmann’s and Reeves’s inventions, at least convergent evolution might. Perhaps confronted with the popularity of the panorama halls, Japanese marketers of these devices also adopted the term panorama for another form of visual spectacle just like Fuhrmann had done earlier in Berlin.38

Of course, today we recognize that in form and function the stereoscope and the panorama hall have very little to do with one another.39 Scholar of human behavior Hosoma Hiromichi recognizes the confusion as experiential, stemming from a blurring of the lines between the “real world (environment)” produced by the mechanism of the panorama hall and the “feeling of presence” produced by stereographs. He notes that the two forms are distinct because the viewer is oriented outward to a landscape vista with the panorama, where the viewer is oriented inward toward the interior of the trick of the apparatus in the case of the stereoscope.40 And yet the fact that the stereographic viewing mechanism was billed as “panoramic” in both European and Japanese contexts exhibits the durability of a powerful marketing strategy.

A more fundamental link between these two affordances can be seen in the architectural phenomenon of the twelve-story tower in Asakusa, the first skyscraper in Japan where visitors could pay a fee to enter the viewing deck on the upper floors. It is significant that, in contrast to the simple, box-like designs of Fuhrmann’s Kaiserpanorama and Reeves’s coin-operated apparatus, the Japanese panoramic stereographs were often decorated with ornaments resembling architectural features. The above-mentioned 1904 advertisement, for instance, features a particularly intricate design that seems to have been relatively resilient over several versions of the machine produced over the following decade in Japan. With its cresting, pinnacles, cupola, spires, and flèche, the exterior design of the machine’s wooden cabinet are consonant with the look of the skyscraping, “cloud-penetrating” brick and wood tower, which had opened fourteen years earlier. The exterior of the panoramic stereo-machines would be the first impression that all purchasers and consumers would have of the machine, before deciding to approach it, insert coins, and peer inside. In this sense, the exterior of the machines placed throughout the city echoes the presence of the tower in the city and preceded the gaze at the stereographs inside it.

The stereoscope, the Kaiserpanorama, the panorama hall, and skyscraping tower offer different viewing experiences: the solitary gaze of the stereoscope is multiplied into a number of simultaneous parallel experiences by the Kaiserpanorama; the panorama hall and tower both offer spectacles to be enjoyed as part of a crowd. With the first two devices, a gaze into lenses is required. In the latter two buildings, a gaze outward from a center is the norm. But there are also some important similarities. The very presence of such devices in the world means that they begin to transform their environs even before they are “used.”41 Those who use the stereoscope must insert and switch the stereograph cards before and between looking through the lenses, thus holding and beholding the apparatus as such; the panorama hall and the Kaiserpanorama are urban destinations; the tower is a spectacle not only for those who go to the top but for all city dwellers who marvel at its dizzying height; and the automatic panoramic stereoscope stands in a room, beckoning potential customers to insert a coin and peruse the images behind the lenses. The consumers who sit around the Kaiserpanorama in chairs staring into the binocular lenses of the machine are paralleled by the potential consumers who stand lined up in anticipation of sitting down and looking inside.42

Unlike the tower, a unique location as the only structure of its kind in Tokyo, the panoramic stereograph was sold with the purpose of being “set up at key points around the city” (shigai no yōsho ni setchi).43 In other words, the private moment of a singular view through the machines must be contextualized by the fact that, like the multiple panorama halls dotting the cities, the goal was to install the panoramic stereographs throughout the country. As a network, the machines potentially widened the reach and market penetration of stereoscopic views, broadly casting images across the cityscape in a way that anticipates television. To peep, one need not have purchased a series of photos and a viewer (or know someone who did); rather, one could walk up to a public device, deposit a coin, and begin viewing.

The consumption of such viewing apparatuses does not start when one stares into the machine or enters the hall to view; it begins at the moment when the environment in which it is placed is transformed by the presence of the mechanism itself. Before the machine can serve up its stereocards, before it can become a machine that stages sights, these staging sites are themselves staged sights to behold. Acknowledging that the viewing of the device itself becomes part of the viewing experience shows that the views mediated by these various devices are already premediated or doubly mediated. The double views themselves are layered with another view—the view of the device. This view external to the device (the view of the exterior) itself guarantees that the later, secondary view into the machine will be recalled as a constructed or mediated trick. There is a stereomimetic tension between these two seemingly antipodal ways of understanding the media: even as viewers know it is a trick, they are to be fascinated by the trick.

The visual discourse on the tower in Asakusa reveals this binary structure, that the tower was both to be seen and to afford seeing. Early marketing materials emphasized not only its height and panoramic view but also its interior features. For instance, a series of four posters titled “Diagram of the Great Japanese Cloud Piercing Tower,” published soon after the red-brick tower opened in 1890, advertised it with a tableau of rooftop and interior views alongside a print of the tower, their vertical arrangement emphasizing its height. This juxtaposition of the external view with internal images of the spiral staircase, the elevator cars, the elevator motor gears, and panoramic view were common, positioning the viewer both outside and within the structure.44 Two of the four posters advertised the panoramic views of the city, reflecting the context of the panorama hall boom. But that three of the four advertise the interior marks an important aspect of the historical allure of the tower—it was not only a site to gaze out of but also a sight to see into.45 Similarly, even though there was less emphasis on the interior mechanisms and workings of the panoramic stereoscope machines of the late Meiji, they were also promoted, instilling the desire to be both gazed upon and gazed into.

The very fact that a building could transform the landscape was part of the experience. As with the panorama halls in which the observer was “placed in the center of an expansive spectacle that extends across the walls around him,”46 the tower in Asakusa provided an expansive view of the cityscape around it. Similarly, the panorama halls gave observers “a sense of visual power and control they could never hope to experience while being swallowed up in, distracted and consumed by the busy, noisy, confusing metropolises in which they lived.”47 Clearly, part of the thrill that these structures imbued in their consumers had much to do with the buildings themselves. This is why even decades after the debut of the panorama halls, advertisements were still featuring images of the exteriors of the halls.

The interior and exterior affordances of these architectural sites (the halls and the tower that enable the sensation of distance and perspective on the city spread out before and around them) give us further insight into thinking about stereoscopy. Brian Massumi reminds us that the panorama hall is not contrary to a Cartesian view often associated with stereoscopy and its underlying desire to penetrate the z-axis: “The panoramic image did not in fact break with traditional perspective, but multiplied it.”48 As binocular viewing glasses and monocular telescopes were often provided in the centers of the panorama pavilions, so too were they affixed atop the biggest panorama of all, the view from atop the twelve-story tower in Asakusa. Edogawa Rampo’s story “The Man Traveling with the Brocade Portrait,” for example, is premised on the scopophilia of a man who spies a woman through binoculars while gazing out from the tower.49 At the very moment of getting a lifelike panorama or a presumably unadulterated unmediated glimpse of a real city vista, visitors were already being shown that looking through binocular lenses might enhance the optical experience.

In addition to the privileged position of the paid consumer from within and atop these buildings, there was the open-access position of people all around the outside of the tower and the halls who paid no entrance fee. The tower’s primary optical affordance was for the casual observer who had no ticket for admission, as a landmark orienting the city walker.50 Just as the view from within may separate the viewer from the city, as Seiji M. Lippit suggests, the tower also grounds the city around it.51 Rampo’s character remarks: “All you had to do was find a slight rise anywhere in Tokyo, and you could see what everyone called the ‘Red Ghost.’”52 City dwellers gazing toward the tower gained a sense of perspective and distance. Just as the architecture itself offered a transformative view of the city from on high, the presence of the early skyscraper in the city transformed the city around it even for those on the ground. Similarly, the presence of a “stereographic panorama” (a mini tower resembling the full-sized one in Asakusa) in a room transforms the space around it, imbuing it with spectacle, wonder, and desire.

The similarities between the panoramic stereograph, panorama halls, and the twelve-story tower are not limited to this dynamic between exterior and interior. The content of the views was also in a complex relation. Responding to the claim that the French city literature of Balzac corresponded directly to the panorama, scholar Maeda Ai notes an absence of panorama in early modern Japan. Instead, he writes that peeping devices were the best visual correspondence to Hattori Bushō’s literary New Tales of Tokyo Prosperity (1874). For devices providing three-dimensional perspectives in early modern Tokyo, vignettes of city life were more common than sweeping panoramas. Maeda emphasizes the relations of “people and things” that populate horizontal landscapes.53 Timon Screech’s descriptions of such nozoki karakuri (peeping boxes) significantly include both panoramic-like landscapes (of hell, heaven, China, factories in Jakarta) and portraits of elephants and green-grocer girls.54 What happened two decades later, when the panorama halls themselves came to Japan around the same time that stereoscopy was an active consumer phenomenon, seems to be, if not a unification of forms, at least a continuous play between them.

All these media emphasized the play between landscape in the background or distant view and “people and things” in the middle or foreground. From the beginning, panoramas in Japan were part diorama. For instance, a Battle of Vicksburg panorama was displayed in Tokyo with real U.S. Civil War artifacts and weapons in front of the walls painted with vistas. And the Automatic Panorama (Jidō Panorama) in October 1894 featured automatons (jidō ningyō) populating the diorama in front of the panorama walls. Panorama pavilions were also related to a lens-mediated view, insofar as binoculars were available to visitors.55 This play between figure and ground, portrait and landscape, dummies representing corpses and paintings of battlefields was deemed to give unique perspective. And the play is doubled in the dichotomy between panorama hall and the stereoscope that finds perhaps a moment of unity in the panoramic stereoscope. Crary explains, “Pronounced stereoscopic effects depend on the presence of objects or obtrusive forms in the near or middle ground.”56 It is significant, in this regard, that Crary includes in his book Suspensions of Perception three copies of stereographic images from the historical Kaiserpanorama, which he claims have nothing to do with panorama. One of these images—of Niagara Falls—is all background. In contrast, the second image provides a London streetscape background and middle ground. And the third, a group of Japanese women in kimonos situated against a backdrop of a bamboo fence in a garden.57 According to Crary’s own logic, the 3D effect of the Japanese stereograph is the most pronounced of the three and also happens to share a structural characteristic of panorama halls, which often had diorama-like dummies staged in front of the walls. What began as a way to enhance the stereoscopic effect (by placing human figures in the foreground) became a trope in Japanese stereographs of Enami and others with the full-body nostalgic portraits of Japanese men in samurai wardrobe and women in kimonos.

Such images found their way into the panoramic stereograph machines. Hosoma describes the contents of the photos of people displaying various manners and customs (fuzoku jinbutsu), such as “beautiful women and ikebana,” “peony field and beautiful woman,” and “beautiful women playing go.”58 He quotes the explanatory pamphlet for one of the panoramic stereoscope machines as discussing the distance between the things (flowers) in the background and the people (beauties) in the foreground. Hosoma writes:

Why did this writer [of the pamphlet] mistake “panoramic photograph” and “stereoscopic photograph”? . . . There is the particular expression, “real things, real environments [jitsubutsu jikkyō],” to describe the feeling of being present [rinjōkan] in a panorama pavilion. . . . This writer took his image of the panorama pavilion, then confused the presence obtained from the panorama pavilion and the presence obtained from the stereoscopic photograph, and then mistakenly called the stereoscopic photograph a “panoramic photograph.”59

Here, Hosoma suggests that whether the bodies in the foreground were Japanese beauties or Russian war dead, beautiful or dreadful, it was the feeling of presence that mattered over the specific content. In addition, there were photographic beauty contests hosted within the Asakusa tower. Soon after its opening in 1890, William K. Burton, the designer of the tower, hosted a beauty contest featuring photos of geisha; such exhibitions would become something of a trend there.60 Thus, where the panorama hall tended toward morbid depictions of wars to evoke the feeling of presence and the tower featured landscapes populated by beauties to create the same effect, stereoscopic panorama machines unified such genres of content, both the allure of Japanese beauties and morbid curiosity about war.61

The new machines were also marketed as wonders of automation and vending. On October 22, 1903, the Yomiuri Shinbun ran a brief article on an “innovative inventive apparatus” (zanshin hatsumei kikai). As the article described it, a company near the Yoroi bridge was turning out “panoramic photographs and panorama stereoscopes” that, besides “being suitable for classroom use,” would also be “mechanisms for naturally earning revenue” (shizen ni shūnyū o eru yō no shikumi). The writer was cryptic in describing the device but was clearly impressed by the fact that it had “automatic functions requiring no manual labor.”62 This focus on automation emphasizes the lack of a hand crank seen in earlier versions of column stereographs. Like the many and sundry hand-operated or cranked cabinet stereoviewers marketed primarily for the private home from the 1850s to the 1920s, these Japanese machines provided multiple views of a series of photos, but with the twist of automatically advancing images.63

Crary emphasizes the constraints on the body of the stereoscopic viewer (who had to fit their eyes into a single particular position in a viewfinder or wear ill-fitting glasses) and the subject’s cognitive role in the “radical abstraction and reconstruction of optical experience” that stereoscopy occasions.64 The fact is that we never encounter the stereoscope solely from the position of our eyes plugged into the viewing machine. We do not remain exclusively in that Cartesian and solitary space. Rather, as Crary and Mark B. N. Hansen remind us, we are necessarily also always simultaneously aware of the apparatus in our world. Indeed, the function of the apparatus depends on our “manual action.”65 In other words, as in a film, there is the ordering and composing of the viewing; but unlike a film, such ordering and composition is accomplished by the viewer. Since stereographs were most often meant to be viewed in a series, there is a fourth axis of time that needs to be considered. And yet the labor involved in manual composition with the traditional stereoscope in which the viewer had to manipulate cards by hand differs from the automatically rendered (pre)compositing of the vending machine. This temporal factor of viewing through the automatic panorama stereoscope collapses or connects differences between still photography and motion pictures.

Unlike film, the automatic stereopanorama did not animate movement but rather created montage effects. This emphasis on the automatic viewing of stereoscopic images in the advertisement and labeling of the devices mirrors what Walter Benjamin writes about the Kaiserpanorama—namely, that it resembles cinematic viewing. Whereas Benjamin’s early experiences of the Kaiserpanorama predated the advent of film, the introduction of the stereopanorama in Japan was virtually simultaneous (for many Japanese citizens, motion pictures would have been the earlier medium). Benjamin was particularly interested in the montage-like way in which the Kaiserpanorama brought a sequence of images before its viewer. In the end, he contrasts the bell that rang between views with the music that seamlessly stitched together the montage of images in the cinema.66 But the absence of music was not necessarily characteristic of Japanese panoramic stereoscopes, several of which had “organ included” (orugan iri) or “music included” (ongaku iri) printed right on the machine.67 Benjamin emphasizes the machinic time of the imaginary travel to foreign places ordered by the Kaiserpanorama’s bell, while the cinematic music of the organ in the Japanese machines could help smooth potentially jarring juxtapositions and transitions. In Benjamin’s sense, then, these Japanese machines were more cinematic than the Kaiserpanorama for the viewers. But the different sounds may have had similar marketing effects. Benjamin argues that the bell punctuating the montage of images created a sort of Pavlovian response of desire for the next image. The music could do the same for people near a Japanese stereographic panorama, who could hear the music play as they watched those with their brows pressed to the machine, for whom the music might also have helped to smooth the transitions between the images flipping by.

Hosoma refers to panoramic stereoscope machines as providing “scenery as sales items” (urimono toshite no keishiki).68 The innovative vending machines sold not just these visual amusements but also trinkets and goods.69 In 1906, Kuroki Shingo of Osaka applied for (and received the following year) the patent for an “automatic binocular fortune vending apparatus” (jidō sōgankyō tsujiura-shutsu sōchi), which sold paper fortunes along with its views. The innovation was the vending method, so the patent gives details not about the stereograph-changing mechanism employed but rather about the coin-operated sales mechanism.70 Advertising, too, increasingly focused on the varied earning potential of automatic vending machines. Early advertisements for the stereoscopic panoramas made vague promises about “mechanisms for earning revenue,” but by 1914, the Arita company advertised machines that were able to sell fortunes (omikuji and tsujiura), cigarettes, and strong liquor (shurui).71 A similar vending/viewing machine from 1905 (on exhibition today at the Takahara Kyōdokan in Gifu Prefecture) not only sold a series of thirteen pictures with musical organ accompaniment but also dispensed packets of the popular Jintan mint. The advertisement for this Jintan machine on exhibit with the machine details the placement of this panoramic stereoscope. The vending machine debuted at the Jintan Park tower directly next door to the taller cloud-piercing tower in Asakusa.72

What these machines display is photographic culture in transition between handicraft and speed—a moment after hand-painted lantern slides and before feature-length films. The automatization of scrolling machine views is doubled by the automatization of the sales. Both automatizations are labor-saving: no one is needed to crank the machine for the next stereocard or to sell the Jintan (or other widgets). The legacy of this new medium for spectacle and sales persists in the continued success of Japanese vending machines (jidōhanbaiki, lit. “automatic sales machines”) today. But, as Marxist theory explains, such mechanisms do not, in fact, “save” labor but rather merely obscure or alienate the labor to another hidden level. In the example of the automatic viewing/vending machine, the labor of advancing the images and selling the mints is merely shifted to the industries that arose to stock the machines and constantly create new spectacular products with which to load them. In this sale of goods and illusions, we are presented a bifurcated vision of a Debordian society of spectacle in which some of the goods themselves are illusions.73

Following Maeda Ai’s interpretation of the panorama of Tokyo as seen in Japanese literature in terms of Henri Lefebvre’s ideas of urban organization of space, we can say that these new media as monuments in the city became symbolic spaces of spectacle (the panorama hall and the skyscraping tower were spectacular monuments worthy of visits, as were the vending machines that miniaturized sightseeing experiences). But the gap between these symbolic spectacular spaces and what Maeda and Lefebvre might call their paradigmatic spaces (what Lefebvre defines in relational and binary terms, or what we can think of as oppositional parallax spaces characterized by dichotomies of left/right, inside/outside, center/periphery, or town/country) provides some perspective. And ultimately the conduit for this perspective would be the so-called syntagmatic space (for Lefebvre and Maeda, the transportations systems of rivers or roads, but we might do better to think of these media themselves as the syntagmatic infrastructural connectors for this networking of spaces).74 Rather than staring into the future, these spectacular panoramic parallax devices created a nostalgia, the seeming ability to stare into the vanishing and distant past. But, of course, they were simply conduits creating new televisual spectacles not meant for catching a glimpse of a past that had been frozen in time but meant for cultivating longing for the vanishing beautiful past or aestheticized violence of the recent past in the present.

Solid-State Nostalgia and 2.5D Anamorphosis: When 3D Was Surreal

Stereoscopy is said to be about viewing solid objects, and yet it so often leaves its viewers disappointed. Physician, poet, and early theorist of stereoscopy Oliver Wendell Holmes used the word solid intentionally in reference to the hard card format of stereographic images. Here it is useful to consider the Greek etymologies of the compounds stereograph—the writing of a solid—and stereoscope—the gazing upon a solid.75 When talking specifically about the stereo-optics of image, Holmes seems aware that the solid could be related not in opposition to a gas or a liquid, but to an empty husk that is only a surface—a nonsubstantial empty shell, only skin deep. Holmes also talks of collecting stereographs as akin to hunters collecting “skins”: “The time will come when a man who wishes to see any object, natural or artificial, will go to the Imperial, National, or City Stereographic Library and call for its skin or form, as he would for a book at any common library.”76 The word skin is important not only because it might conjure, for contemporary readers, racialized anthropological depictions of the world in early stereoscopy but also because it relates to what would become a common critique of stereoscopy—namely, that the three-dimensional effect looks thin, false, or somewhat attenuated. Here the common critique that the trick of stereoscopy is apparent in the way that depth looks anamorphic rather than rounded, that the edges around figures make them seem as though thin onionskins or paper cutouts popping up in children’s dioramas.77

Consideration of the two most common Japanese language translations for the stereo in stereoscope or stereograph provides a different perspective on the contrasts between skin and surface and between depth and solid. Rittai (standing-body) and jittai (real-body) echo the sense of solidity and reality of a body seeming to stand before the viewer; the “body” (-tai) in both words captures the notion of figure and physique—that which would have to stand out against the background for the effect of presence to be produced.78 Through these Japanese etymologies, stereoscopy discourse shares the notion of ground and figure discussed above in reference to both the stereoscopic technology (Crary) and panorama aesthetics (Maeda) and reflections on what I have called stereomimesis from Karatani, Kant, Derrida, Erich Auerbach, and Edgar Rubin, among others. But the word rittai is also related to a later Japanese critique of the falsity of realism and praise of the surreality of stereoscopy, in that the abstract modernist style of cubism would be translated using the same term. In the early 1920s when rittai-shashin meant “stereoscopic photography” and rittai-shugi meant “cubism,” stereoscopy could no longer be thought of solely as adhering to things as they are in the world.

The supposed truth of the 3D imagination produced by the two 2D photographs lies not in the images alone but in some “mode of ideation,” to use the words of Wilhelm Max Wundt.79 Wundt’s book Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology was translated into Japanese in 1902 and explores the ramifications of the then recent innovations in stereoscopy for psychology.80 In Wundt’s view (later supported by cognitive science), the 3D image is not, in fact, instantaneously apprehended as a single image composed equally of the two images on the card but rather results from an uneven shifting between two images, one of which is dominant, while the other performs a supplementary function.81

Foregrounding the viewer’s role in image construction through “the operation of reconciling disparity” shows stereoscopy to be a mind–body–machine nexus. As such, it raises the very question of the use value of the apparatus. The fact that there are some people who can train not just their eyes but themselves to resolve three dimensions from the stereocards without the aid of lenses in stereoscopes reminds us that the machine is only part of the mediated experience. And even those who do not need the stereoscope must use their brains and eye muscles. This intervention of and interpretation in the brain contrasts with the notion of the immediacy of the techno-image, the seemingly immediate multiplanar parallax, a parallax of instantaneous apprehension of two positions. The brain’s role suggests a movement over time (a toggling) between positions and foregrounds the spectator position, resolution, rendering, or interpretation. This tension—between the power of the image, on the one hand, lying in the image itself (immediacy) and, on the other, residing in the minds of the viewers (interpretation)—is why the supposedly realistic medium has been called false and even horrific.

Edogawa Rampo writes of the horror of viewing simple red/blue 3D films where beasts lunge at the camera or poles jut out toward the eyes of the viewer.82 His horror is consonant with that of the future death capture in every snapshot that Roland Barthes identifies as the future-anterior capture inherent of all photography. But the duration of a photo is not simply within the snap of the shot or the flash of a bulb. As Derrida notes, the idea of an instant captured on film is not quite right in the first place. So when photographs or stereographs are the impetus for an affective nostalgic response, it helps to think of the duration of the exposure, the emulsion, and the developing process, as well as the time elapsed between these actions, all of which is typically lumped together as the instant of photo-taking and the flash of the view.83 The feeling of presence created by such 3D images is said to feel like a “click” (namely, an instant when the images are thought to resolve, though this click too is a myth with the toggling between images continuing through a duration or period of the so-called resolve).84 Even when mechanically automated in the panorama machine or the cinema, a singular view or peep is never an instant but instead has a duration. Superimposed onto all these durations for stereoscopy is the duration for the mind to resolve the two images also leading to an affective response or feeling of presence that itself may have an undetermined duration. Of course, quasi-realistic and nostalgic perspectives on time and history produced by the stereograph may be present in all photographs, as Susan Sontag suggests, but the effect seems somehow enhanced through the 3D perspective of the stereograph.85

The question here is whether the trick of 3D has any effect, whether enhancing or mitigating, on the falseness or horror already inherent in the 2D photo. Crary puts the problem down to the fact that the 3D effect of stereoscopy is spotty at best, “a disunified and aggregate field of disjunct elements,” because the two two-dimensional photos mean that “the fundamental organization of the stereoscopic image is planar.”86 In other words, stereoscopy is not a 3D but a 2.5D: a view that suggests and approximates actual embodied stereovision without quite reproducing it. For Crary, this fact about stereoscopy ends up foregrounding precisely that which photography seeks to erase—the falseness of Adorno’s and Benjamin’s phantasmagoria of media—and is the reason for its obsolescence. And yet, the openness or opacity of its own trickery and fakery is the reason for it being taken up by surrealists.87 That is to say, artists looking to transcend the limitations of scientific fidelity to representation of nature turned to stereoscopy precisely because it was so clearly a trick. And this sense of trickery would not be dissolved by the innovation of incorporating ocular convergence into the apparatus for taking or viewing stereographs (in 1953) and stereoscopic films (in 1973).88 Indeed, the brief rebirth and quicker death of stereoscopy around the convergence technology of RealD 3D (color 3D video-drawing on convergence techniques and polarized or flicker lenses) beginning in 2009 seemed to many observers’ eyes to be an improvement on the planarity of two side-by-side images because it took into account the way our eyes cross and converge on objects to see them. But the adoption of RealD 3D for the motion picture Avatar and by major Japanese television and cinema production companies would wane with inevitable tiring of the trick and the development of other tricky media like VR technologies.89 All media work necessarily as filters or lenses distorting our spatially and temporally finite experiences of the infinite world, reducing such experiences to an even more limited scope. Of course, some media will be considered even more exciting than our experience for a time, but ultimately our experience of reality proves to be more fully stimulating or at least unparalleled by our media. This does not stop the dream of better, clearer, more fully rendered representation. This cyclical nature of realist desire was recognized by surrealists.

Writing in 1939, when stereoscopy itself had long been a throwback to a bygone age,90 the surrealist poet Hagiwara Sakutarō reflected on his deep, lingering fascination with stereoscopic photography as a hobby. In an essay titled “My Camera,” Hagiwara too finds the stereoscope compelling not as an embodiment of the real and not because it is kitsch but precisely as a solid medium of gloom and nostalgia.

This stereoscope alone is my one and only companion. And I myself have an essential reason for this. The reason I have a camera is neither for taking so-called art pictures nor for documentary photographs that preserve memory. In a word, through the optical effects of the machine, I want to reflect or project [utsushitai] the nostalgia [kyōshū] of my own heart as it is reflected in natural scenery. From a long time ago, there has been a spot in my heart for that kind of nostalgia, like the so-called loneliness of haiku, the lullaby heard in those days of innocence, some limitless romantic yearning, or even some extremely miserable and pathetic song. So in order to project or reflect the nostalgia within me, the “stereo” standing-form [cubist] photos [sutereo no rittai shashin] cannot be beat. And that is because those stereographs (a kind of miniature original panorama [honrai panorama no ko mokei]) themselves have their essence in their particular gloom of the panorama; the panorama is something that gives the feeling of a mysterious nostalgic desolation. . . . I want to say here it is “like the real view [jikkei],” but the reason I will not say it is that the panorama of stereographs are different than the real view, because they are mysterious and illusory. Here, like the paintings and the objects in the panorama hall, the distance between the background and the foreground gives the illusion of spatial representation [kūkan hyōzō]. . . . I don’t have any interest in regular photos, because only stereograms reflect or project this. Regular photos are planar [heimen], merely copying two dimensions of the world. So, to the extent that photorealism exists, it is all the more far from the poems and dreams of my heart. That is because the nostalgia of my heart is dreamily composed only in three-dimensional space.91

In Hagiwara’s view, the stereoscope fails in its promise of presenting some better, clearer vision of a reality for a passive viewer and gives only a version of nostalgia for a solid state of things, albeit one that never actually existed but is distilled through a gloomy, lonely heart.92 The fact that he openly compares the panorama hall with the “miniature” panorama of the stereoscope comes from his sense that the panorama hall also provided a three-dimensional perspective. And his configuration “sutereo no rittai shashin” (translated above as “‘stereo’ standing-form [cubist] photos”) is odd because Hagiwara, an otherwise careful wordsmith, essentially doubles the term. Here he is either just being redundant or in his mind stereo and rittai are not equal.

In an earlier essay recalling his childhood visits to the Ueno Panorama Pavilion where he saw exhibits on the U.S. Civil War and the Battle of Waterloo, Hagiwara also mentions this sense of depth in the play between the “real objects and the picture” (jitsubutsu to e) in the hall, recounting a game he used to play after hearing about the structure of the hall (i.e., that there were both paintings and real objects): “with the curiosity of a child, I would passionately try to discover the borders between the real objects and the painting.”93 And the composition of his actual photos adheres to his recollection of the panorama. Over 40 percent of the extant photos taken by Hagiwara are stereoscopic, and 33 percent of those capture people.94 Some critics remark that the soft, almost hazy focus of Hagiwara’s photos has the effect of emphasizing the gap between close-up and background.95 His theorization of panorama hall and practice of stereographic photos are not some sideline hobbyist comments but would become core principle understandings for his poetics.96 In the end, Hagiwara, whether through photographs or poetry, was more interested in the play between the objects and paintings or panorama and city that produced the effect than in the effect itself. Similarly, the stereoscopic images he took conveyed not the solid objects that Holmes envisioned but poetry, dreams, and fantasies (no longer a connection to the world but a retreat from it). In this view, the cognitive space between the images of the hollow skins (between two planar images) in stereographs requires a filling in, and this requirement inspires the surrealist poet.97 In Hagiwara’s stereograph as poetry or poetry as stereograph, the medium’s reality lies beyond the medium, elsewhere, in nostalgia, a dream of a time in which something (some solid object in reality) could be recorded and documented in time and space.

This powerful understanding of the nostalgia of the stereoscope seems to have rubbed off on Hagiwara’s daughter, but for her, the medium connects through its very loneliness. In an article commemorating her father, titled “By My Father’s Bed,” Hagiwara Yōko (a novelist and prize-winning essayist) writes:

Of all the things around my father’s bedside the ones that left the biggest impression were the stereographs. Beginning in his twenties he became absorbed in photos—taking and developing them himself, but by the time of my childhood memories he was already taking stereographs.98

She writes of disturbing her solitary father alone in the gloom of his room to bring him tea and taking some time to examine his stereographs with avid curiosity. “For a father who could not clean up after himself at all, he sure took care of those stereographs arranging them neatly in the glass cabinet.” The first time she tried to see the photos it was too dark and gloomy. And when she tried a second time:

I thought that they would be boring photos [tsumaranai shashin], but it was exactly as though living things were coming out of the picture. I became enthralled and tried swapping in various photos.

However, just as I was looking, as only a world of frustrating illusion came to appear, I began to feel inexpressibly lonely for a long time while sitting on my father’s cold hard mattress.99

The passage is short but contains the entire history of stereoscopy, compressed—the fascination, doubt, mystery, and allure for the strange object, the desire to behold it, suspicion, the first use, the impressiveness of the representation, the feeling of presence, and then estrangement from it. And, finally, the essay as a whole connotes a sort of nostalgia with which the genre was always already imbued. At last, she connects across time to the memory of her father not as a primitive other from the past but as a surreal ghostly image and memory of loneliness. The medium is at once connecting and alienating; it is the primary means by which she connects to her father’s alienation.

Bernard Stiegler describes photography as “two technical systems [of lens and shutter and chemical and paper] and two separate viewings: those of the photographer and of the spectator.”100 I want to emphasize that stereography does all of this in a similar manner, only more intensely, and that the binocular image presents the odd temporality of the photo in its most solid state. Stereoscopy also puts the subject in a relationship with the object that stages a missed connection up front, as a figure popping out of a flat landscape or background. In other words, with its play between figure and ground over time, stereography makes salient nothing less than the multiple long durations of the photograph always already hidden or hiding behind the apparent flash of the moment of taking and glimpsing.

The sense of sullen nostalgia in the stereograph for both Hagiwaras lies in its temporal gap between the taking and the viewing that Stiegler identifies and the spatial parallax gap that is the exploited technê of the stereo apparatus. This gloom is not the dark space of the horror of getting one’s eye poked out, as it is for Rampo’s idea of 3D cinema, but rather the gloom of the temporal and spatial abyss of modernity as the gap between the dream of being present and experiencing a sense of reality always belatedly through mediation, a gap between the image chemically recording the light bouncing off the object and the darkness of the solitary mind that must make sense of the double images alone in the machine. It is the solitary failure to concretize a connection with the object, the failure to ever truly realize or resolve presence. In this view, stereoscopic images are less about representing solid bodies in perspective, as in the grotesque (horrific or beautiful) appropriations of the technology, than they are about a kind of nostalgia for a long-absent way of life (for presence).

Panorama Islands, Additive Manufacturing for Posterity, and the Return of the Real

In The Strange Tale of Panorama Island, Rampo creates a world in which a madman transforms an island wilderness into the semblance of a panorama hall by erecting a viewing tower at the center of the titular island and creating various scenes that trick visitors’ perceptions. The story of the murderous, single-minded antihero Hitomi Hirosuke serves as an allegory for the moral consequences of cycloptic spectacles that suggest a Cartesian mind–body divide. In one of the climactic scenes, Hitomi (lit. “one-view”) explains to his wife his theory of creation behind his construction of the island and describes a key function of the panorama hall. The fascinating thing about the panorama halls of his youth, he says, was their spatial doubling:

Outside the panorama hall, the streets that one was accustomed to seeing everyday exist. And inside the panorama hall, no matter the direction in which you look, there’s no sign of that world, and the Manchurian plains extend to the horizon line far away. In other words, the double worlds of the streets and the plains exist in the same spot. At least, it gives rise to such an illusion . . . displayed in such a way that you cannot distinguish the boundary between the real things and the painting.101

The doubling of the spaces makes the entire panorama hall into a medium for conjuring another world that is contiguous but also at a remove. The story of Panorama Island stages what might happen if the walls of the panorama hall were to evaporate, so that the world itself became a panorama. In the fantasy novel, the answer is that deceitful things—murder, impersonation, crimes of passion, etc.—happen. Rampo’s story suggests that there is something fundamentally perverse about the nature of virtual worlds, simulacra, and representation. Ultimately, it shows that mimesis has the potential not only to create transformative fictive worlds but also to transform space and behavior in the real world. This story then presents something like a budding haunted media critique avant la théorie that explores the darkest repercussions of both aspects of mimesis.

The story’s depiction of a completely human-designed island environment evokes an almost magical transformation or manifestation of spaces through technology that is nothing particularly new. Indeed, one of the oldest forms of human artifice is gardening. Though vision was always important for such transformations, in modernity the mediation of such sites through lenses and film have made the stakes of such artifice more tangible. For instance, Enami’s stereographs (ca. 1898) of the great bronze Buddha statue at Kamakura illuminate one aspect of the media as totem pole. Though once gilded, the statue today exhibits a green patina with only faint remnants of its golden past visible near the ears of the great figure that towers over ten meters in height. The statue is hollow, so visitors have been able to appreciate both the inside and outside of the monument for hundreds of years, and ancient graffiti still mark the inside of its walls. Today, the Kotoku-in shrine garden that houses the Buddha forbids specific kinds of new photographic gadgets—selfie sticks and drones.102 But along with Mount Fuji, the statue was one of the major subjects for early photographers of Japan, including Enami.

One of Enami’s stereographs of the Kamakura Buddha differs from the vast number of photos of it from the time, which tend to immortalize the monument from a frontal angle. Enami’s stereograph views the statue instead from a three-quarter angle, which has the effect of enhancing the feeling of depth, not only because trees in the foreground frame the statue and a man stands in front of it but also because the angle highlights the statue’s profile.103 The paper diorama-like setup of Enami’s photo reminds viewers that, like so many ancient monuments, the statue is hollow or thin in its monumentality; indeed, there is no direct connection with the original statue that stood on this spot: the current verdigris-covered statue is a rebuilding of a wooden original, and yet it is still prized as ancient in its own right, having withstood the tests of time since its thirteenth-century reconstruction.104 One rare photo from circa 1890, included in the New York Public Library Photography Collection, shows the statue from behind with doors open in the back airing it out.105 Enami’s photo, without similarly showing the statue’s interior, has a similar effect of revealing a depth through perspective while emphasizing the thinness of the diorama-like layers of fore-, mid-, and background.

In these thin skins of the stereography, the medium of hollow yet solid bronze statue would be reborn. A rebirth of stereoscopic photography in the late 1920s was founded on the use of the technology to create monuments occupying space in our world. The 3D scanning and printing developed by Morioka Isao, inspired by François Willème’s breakthrough stereoscopic photosculptures of the mid-nineteenth century, present a stunning case of the transformational possibilities of stereomimesis. In a series of articles in 1927 and 1928, published in prominent photography journals and mainstream general interest magazines and newspapers, Morioka wrote and was interviewed about his experiments using photography to quickly create accurate and precise sculptures. He claimed to have had a deep interest in the faces of the literati, such as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Kikuchi Kan, whom he had befriended when he worked for the journal Shinshōsetsu (New Novels) upon graduation from university. In articles and patent applications, Morioka described his system of portrait photography from multiple angles that could act as templates for the precise building of 3D busts and eventually full-body sculptures. Long after Morioka’s “stereophoto-sculptures” (rittaishashin-zō) would be rebranded as 3D scanning and additive manufacturing, his method would be described thus:

In some of the earliest work in Japan, Morioka developed a hybrid process between photosculpture and topography. This method uses structured light (black and white bands of light) to photographically create contour lines of an object. These lines could then be developed into sheets and then cut and stacked or projected onto stock material for carving.106

Though today we would recognize the process as “scanning” and “printing,” many of the contemporary articles from when the technology was debuted did not know what to make of the images of the process that depicted multiple thin white lines of light being shone longitudinally down the face of a model, so they compared the squiggly lines along the stark silhouettes to snakes. The amalgamation of the cutout “snakes” printed on hard stock would then be arranged to form the basis for the mold of the statue.107

Morioka soon put his technique into practice, founding his Stereographic Sculptures Corporation, which over several decades produced statues and sculptures of prominent military leaders, businessmen, scientists, celebrities, and politicians, such as the Marquis Tōgō Heihachirō, Prime Ministers Kishi Nobusuke and Fukuda Takeo, architect Itō Chūta, statesman and postmaster Maejima Hisoka, mechanical engineer Kamo Masao, epidemiologist Ōshima Fukuzō, international film star Douglas Fairbanks, author Helen Keller, and world-famous aviator Charles Lindbergh (as well as Presidents Johnson, Ford, Carter, and Reagan).108

Morioka’s stereographic sculptures of bronze share a lot with the much larger premodern Kamakura Buddha, but the two modes of memorialization are not identical. Where the Daibutsu, with its much-larger-than-life stature and stylized beauty, does not attempt mimetic fidelity to a once-living human, it still remains representative of a figure (in this case, a deity), as well as signifying first and foremost that it is a substitute for the actual real thing.109 If the old medium allowed for a larger-than-life stand-in for and mystification of the human form, the new one is a move toward measurable reality. Though Morioka’s technique could certainly be used to scale up or down the model’s size, commentary on his method consistently emphasizes fidelity and realism. Evoking problematic notions about the potential of reverse mimesis, the U.S. patent for which Morioka filed is fittingly titled “Photographic Method of Reproducing Original Objects.”110 Rather than discussion of how the technique itself cultivates and conjures a particular kind of reproduction, the patent simply claims to reproduce the “original.”

And more than that, it is the Fordist model of reproduction—speed, efficiency, and the trading of artistic craftsmanship for scientific technical precision (it has been called “mechanical sculpture” in other contexts)—that is emphasized in the discourse around Morioka’s process. Here it is unclear whether we have an instantiation of Kant’s mercenary artist who produces for the market or the artist who has been freed by technology of one kind of labor even as the technology requires another. Morioka’s technique does not seem like a passive or natural mechanism for recording objective reality as a sculpted object, but the discourse consistently refers to the representation itself as being realistic. This active mechanism that requires labor (shifted from trained artist to the less skilled handicraft of factory workers) shares much in common with additive manufacturing today. The reduction of labor of the singular artist and its multiplication outward (outsourcing) to a number of people is captured in the articles about the method in the fascination with the speed of production—from the model sitting for the photos, which takes “only five seconds” to modeling a “bronze sculpture within a week.”111 As an early version of what would come to be labeled “rapid prototyping” and “3D printing,” writers compared this short sitting time and rapid build (from photos to sculpture in a matter of days) with the weeks and months a lone artist might take to produce a similar sculpture. Although the process is spoken of as though it is entirely machinic in the historical articles, detailed descriptions of the process reveal the role of the human hand in the process of cutting the forms from the photographic outlines, in using sewing machine technology to stitch the forms together, and in molding the casts for the bronze.112

The process involved in getting several hundred beams of light to be cast onto the surface of an object/subject of the photograph in less than a minute was seen to be at once quite fast—giving an “eerie” (bukimi) feel (like a “death mask”) to many of the statues—as well as too slow: for example, in some cases capturing a distorted facial look produced during the few seconds required to take the series of photos when enough time had passed for a model’s expression to change; the result could be a statue memorializing a face half with a smile and half with a stern expression. Noting the resemblance to detective fiction rather than real life, one writer conjectures uses for the stereographic sculpture technology that extend beyond the 3D printing of statues: psychological diagnosis (presuming an association between facial structure and behavior) and the apprehension of criminals (through something like facial recognition).113

The discourse around the technology suggests that the skill of the artist has been outsourced to the immediacy of the machine. So that now a team of unskilled, presumably low-cost workers can do in a short time what an expensive, skilled artist would have taken more time to do. And the other imagined uses for catching psychopathology in physical form and criminal recognition, too, are about the labor-saving efficiencies of the sculpture. It is no coincidence that today a 1935 sculpture by Morioka of Paul Harris, the founder of the Rotary International organization promoting goodwill among international professionals, stands at the world headquarters in Evanston, Illinois. Morioka was an international businessman, deeply invested in the economies of scale to be reaped from technologies of mechanical reproduction and his connection with the Rotary Club was simply a product of these efforts. Here, the economy of stereomimetic production clearly renders a medium into our physical spaces, transforming how we might understand not only whose visage it captures but also the environment in which the sculpture stands, as well as the modes of production and labor required to produce it. Notable here are the close ties with the consumer markets Morioka cultivated displaying his wares in Daimaru and setting up a “Solid Photograph Statue” studio in Shiseido on the Ginza. In the historical wonderment around the technology, we can read an economimetic spectacle of the medium as commodity fetish akin to Guy Debord’s society of spectacle that pushes consumerism.

Debord marked the beginning of the society of spectacle as the 1920s, when Morioka was first patenting his inventions, likely because of another parallel invention—television.114 Around the same time Morioka was scanning the surfaces of human bodies using stereography, Takayanagi Kenjirō was first scanning the world with an electron gun using a Nipkow disc that effectively sliced the light bouncing off objects in the world into segments that could then be converted to electric signals for transmission. We need not be crassly historicist to see that the technical parallels and near-historical coincidence of these two modes of capturing and reproducing repeat a well-known and more or less long-standing structure of the commodification of everyday life that Debord was attempting to describe as a new or modern phenomenon that seemed to sever us from the past to create an infinite present.

Debord’s description of the society of spectacle may mistake present nostalgia for presentism. What panoramic stereograph, photosculptures, and television display is a present that is nostalgic for an always already vanishing past, an objective reality that can never be completely given presence. These technologies did not so much sever us from the past as show us how the past was always irrecoverable, gone even as it was happening, slipping by through the snap of the shutter. It is not that the advent of these technologies marks the moment in history beyond which everything is simulacra (as Jean Baudrillard claims) but rather that their surveilling and spectacular reproduction of the world is always behind the times, necessarily belated (even when “live”).115 They simply mark a clear moment in the history of human mediation of the world in which we can see manifest the structure of our cultural mediations laid bare. The machinic reproduction makes the totalization (depth and breadth) of the society of spectacle seem present or new, but of course language had already been working this kind of mimetic magic—with its labeling of the world (representation) and thus conjuring into existence (mimicry) that which had never been conceived as such prior to its naming through its ontological trick.

What these Japanese media histories display is an intermediate or blended (what Debord would later call “integrated”) mode between Debord’s two poles of the society of spectacle—the concentrated (fascistic or imperial) and the diffuse (capitalistic) in which consumers are interpellated by a surveilling authority of the system and the advertising regime. We could narrate this media regime transition from panorama stereograph to printed bronze monumental statues as a slow descent from consumer spectacle to fascistic, as the spell of the production efficiencies of Morioka’s new means of statue production turned to serve the memorial interests of the state.116 But I think we do well to think of both concentrated and diffuse modes as present even when one is more salient than the other. The early gaitō terebi (public televisions) of Japan’s 1950s were set up not as great interpellators of the public to serve the national interest by, for instance, pumping up a cult of personality around the emperor or a prime minister (as they were planned for Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia) but rather as opportunities to sell the public on the use value of the new appliances for the home primarily through the broadcasting of sports. But the nascent television industry was not solely driven by a consumerist purchase for the private consumption of the spectacle of sports; the wedding of the emperor in April 1959 also gave a notable boost in home sales of the units.117 And this integrated form of spectacle continues today.

None of Morioka’s bronze sculptures of the 1930s came close to realizing the use to which the body artist Rokudenashiko (a.k.a. Igarashi Megumi) would put to a derivative technology eight decades later. Much to the chagrin of Japanese authorities, in 2014 Rokudenashiko 3D scanned and printed images of her “pussy” (the colloquial manko is the term she insists on over more clinical terms like chitsu, “vagina”). She was arrested for offering 3D modeling files as gifts to sponsors of her crowdsourcing efforts to 3D print a blown-up version to make into a pussy-shaped kayak. With the files, she offered ideas for fun uses to which sponsors could put her pussy molds, such as coffee cup lids and smartphone covers. In a sense, her work remediates the awkward embodiment of the apparatus during the viewing of stereoscopic images into the realm of 3D printing.

At a broad and abstract level, we might begin a conclusion to this chapter by suggesting that stereoscopy is to representation what 3D printing is to mimicry. In other words, the two sides of the mimetic coin are captured by the two forms of stereographic media. And yet it should have been clear already from the discussion of Enami’s photos and the panorama stereoscope that even then the position of the media in the world mattered as much as what content they bore. For 3D printing simply makes manifest what we already knew—that representation and mimicry are indeed two sides of the same coin. In this way, stereomimesis clarifies the seeming contradiction that the media contain: on the one hand, media may contain or capture a truth of objective reality, and on the other hand, media clearly construct such representations as they exist as objects in the world. The new real names this media spectacle produced around the state of this seeming contradiction in which neither natural, passive representation nor active, artistic construct wholly eclipses the other. The point of recognizing and discussing the two modes is to try to move beyond what Hal Foster, in his The Return of the Real, calls the “reductive either/or” constraints on reading as either representation or autoreferential.118 Such acknowledgment of the modalities of mimesis could render a more complete picture of media that is aware of the pitfalls in thinking both that we have finally captured a historical, objective real with media and that what is captured is a construct of the artist or beholder.

Rokudenashiko’s work differs from that of Morioka Isao in content, form, and mediation (here, files circulated for free on the internet). Ultimately, the Japanese courts deemed the potential to seemingly conjure a pussy out of thin air to be obscene. Though the artist herself connects this offense-taking to a general cultural unease about female genitalia, which contributes to body image problems the world over (a content issue), it seems clear that more is at work for those who take offense.119 In Japan, no comparable legal actions are taken against the commodification of genitalia when their reproductions are sold as “adult toys” (otona no omocha) in the forms of dildos and functional artificial vaginas (such as the “onanism cup” [onakappu] series marketed by the TENGA company for the express purpose of masturbation). So it seems the mode of distribution as 3D scan files provided for free with the potential ease of proliferation and reproduction was at least a branch of the root of the perceived offense. Where Morioka’s bronzes were public, monumental, expensive, and primarily of men, Rokudenashiko’s radical edge lies in the female private (parts) made public, pervasive (widely available), and not monumental or maternal, so much as what she terms as “cute and cuddly.” To some degree Rokudenashiko’s work threatens the economy and marketplace not because it competes with sex toys but because it uses technology to provide free or seemingly free copies. It produces pussies outside of both the commerce economy and the sexual economy. This is its threat. Indeed, this problem of spectacle around representation as reproduction is not solely a problem of style or aesthetics. And this is why it is possible to declare, as Crary does, that “the problem of mimesis, then, is not one of aesthetics but one of social power.”120 Ultimately, stereomimesis is a problem of aesthetic and social power.

Rokudenashiko’s work is but one of the many cyclical returns of stereoscopy since its dawn in the mid-nineteenth century. To some degree, its continual return attests to its longevity and our interest, but to some extent it also marks our continual disappointment with it. In the recent market failures of RealD 3D movies and televisions, such as Sony’s BRAVIA 3D (in addition to the ongoing slow market failure of VR headsets), there is an echo of the earlier successive fading of interest in stereography over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So in a way stereoscopy continually dies and lives on in some zombie forms.

Whether this is due to what film critic Ogi Masahiro calls (after the advent of 3D TV in the first decade of the twenty-first century) a shutting down of the viewer’s imagination or something else, there is likely a bigger frame in which to consider the passing of 3D—its multiplanarity.121 All of the cyclical marketing hype over 3D technologies makes similar claims about the immediacy of the 3D techno-image, but, in fact, the products continue to be multiplanar and, therefore, share much with the discourse on the so-called superflat aesthetics and the attendant multiplanar apparatus of Japanese animation. Thomas Lamarre’s explanations of the multiplanarity of anime understand recent innovations in computer graphics animation, video gaming, and film to be part of a multiplanar series of media. In other words, there is a visual media convergence toward the multiplanar. If, as Lamarre quotes Oshii Mamoru, with the advent of CG films, “all film is becoming animation,” then all film is also becoming multiplanar.122 The fundamental difference between multiplanar animation, video games, and films and multiplanar stereoscopy is not insignificant. Where in the former cases the multiple planes are layered atop one another (for instance, as the thin, indeed transparent, cels of early film animation), in stereoscopy, of course, the planes are presented side by side or respectively to each eye. The multiplanarity of the convergence media that Lamarre discusses at length lies within the form of the media themselves, yet with stereoscopy a body or brain is required to complete the ontological multiplanarity, to stitch the images together.

Statuary is erected to monumentalize and memorialize that which no longer exists or will soon fade. Statuary’s promise is that the essence of the thing can last in an iterative form beyond the thing itself. And 3D printing pushes beyond traditional statuary, suggesting we can do away with the thing itself or that the printout can be the thing, not simply its simulacrum. With 3D printing, we might dispose of the thing itself here and rebuild it elsewhere. It marks the obsolescence of the real. This might have been the ultimate threat of Rokudenashiko’s file circulation. If we can conjure pussy from “thin air” (for free, free from financial or sexual economies), is not the power of the pussy reduced? And yet this offense-taking marks the utopian dream of creation that defies the laws of physics—to produce something from nothing. Indeed, as physics and economics agree, no thing is free. Rokudenashiko paid for vaginal rejuvenation surgery, fans donated to her crowdfunded kayak project and in doing so purchased the rights to the files, fans paid for 3D printers and the 3D printer filament through which to print “her” pussies.

All such projects hinge on a hype of better production and distribution (ones without externalities of labor and resource exploitation). But even the Open Meal design project that calls for the digitalization and 3D printing of food toward a “food singularity” will not defeat the laws of physics and economics. Sushi Singularity, Open Meals’ concept restaurant, was launched on the idea that the Star Trek vision of a replicator providing the food we need and desire out of thin air is ready to hand. While the 1960s-era TV show version materializes food at the atomic level through some fantastical as-yet-unfathomable science, the coming Sushi Singularity—engineered by Yamagata University, Yawaraka 3D, Cykinso, and Hydroid, among others—relies on extruding processed and edible food into various shapes from “digital oden” and daikon to cube-shaped hamburgers and “cyber wagashi.” The product of Dentsu (one of Japan’s leading advertising agencies), the slickly marketed imagery of the various projects advertised on the Open Meals website tends to focus on the issues of circulation (we can “teleport” sushi into space) and consumption (the singular sushi will contain precisely the nutrients your body needs because it will be “hyper-personalized” after health analysis data has been provided to the restaurant).123 But clearly all of this fascination with the concepts behind Open Meals is overturned by the fact that resources found the realization of the dream. The tell in the lie that is the Open Meals website is the very fact that to enjoy the teleported sushi one will first have to go to the Sushi Singularity restaurant or eventually own one of the printing machines. Like the marketing of armchair stereoscopic travel in the nineteenth century, such teleportation comes at a cost and operation of the mechanism despite any or all coming automation.

In a sense, the projection of stereoscopy onto the real world that 3D printing produces, whether as statues, pussies, or sushi, seeks to augment reality through mimicry. As futuristic as the Sushi Singularity website wants to seem, there is something deeply nostalgic about its dream, a dream that is not dissimilar to the infantile fantasy of imagining what if our favorite fictional characters or monsters were real. Such dreams of truly augmenting reality explain the runaway success of Pokemon Go! After all, what is such augmentation of reality if not yet another dream that the sum could equal more than the whole of its parts? This kind of mathematical impossibility that enables the dream reveals what the dream really is—a willful ignorance to the whole of its parts. When we say that something is more than the whole of its parts, it is because, unbeknownst to us, another part, a provisionally ignorable part, a part that we did not count, contributed to the sum. Our ignorance of the net parts, whether labor, material, or conceptual, produces our ability to believe in utopic ideas.

The projecting onto the world of 3D photography in the form of 3D printing is what we might call the old media stage or, if we oppose that teleological model, a resting stage in the cyclical narrative of media when a recently developed medium has become so ingrained that it has transformed our everyday reality, sometimes in mundane ways like the positioning of a new vending machine or bronze statue in the city and sometimes in fantastic ways like the teleported sushi. We could state the flow of this chapter as a history: early in its circulation (Enami as samurai), the medium is prized for its connection to reality and authenticity (however false and cultivated and nostalgic that created reality might be); in a later phase (automatic panoramic stereoscope), the media needs remarketing and finds new angles in war and sex content, machinic delivery, and media convergence; in later stages (stereoscope as fantastic fetish and surreal wonder), a critique of the originally perceived affordances (as more realistic perspective on the world and deeper connection to the world) of the medium nearly reverses its claims. And finally (with stereographic sculptures), the medium projects itself into our world in some unexpected way, becoming part of the lived and built environment. These shifts have much to do with binarism at the core of parallax vision and, indeed, philosophical thinking about mimesis. But rather than thinking of these shifts and changes over time as in a teleological history, such shifts might be considered as different modes of mediality that are more or less salient at different moments, that rise and fall in undulating and unpredictable cycles.

If there is any of Karatani’s parallax radicality to this stereomimetic critique, it lies in the surplus value when toggling or flashing between binaries such as nature and composition or art, machine and individual, objective and subjective, anonymous and personal, disembodied and embodied, abstract and named, or stereo and panorama. But while we recognize both modes of mimesis (representation and mimicry), we might also recall that any sense of such radicality itself is ungrounded utopic thinking that is necessarily and even willfully ignoring what really constitutes its perspective. It emanates not from a revealing or uncovering, nor from having transitioned to a new moment of seeing one image to another moment in seeing a different image, but from dwelling in the gap or incongruity between both views. This means viewing Enami’s labor as both anonymous complicity with a capitalist system that is beyond the capability of any single individual to transform and a radical secret that resists by remaining open to eventual discovery and recovery in the future. For the stereoscopic panorama vending machine, it means understanding the automatic views and the physical machine both as a televisually cinematic phantasmagoria and as a totemic, talismanic fetish. These convergences and remediations of media are perhaps best realized in the stereophotographic sculpture. With the technologically produced bronze sculptures, the flash of media as duration of labor saved as well as value squandered (a fading of Benjamin’s aura or Barthes’s punctum in the mechanical ease of reproduction wherein skilled labor seems traded for the technê of the machine itself) becomes easily apparent on the surface. Or rather, the new medium itself records or documents that loss; therefore, enabling punctum or aura to return in the statue not as a marker of the human but as a marker of loss of labor or labor saved. In a way, the media stand in then not as substitutes for but as markers of lack of presence or lack of body. The media in a backward way insist on the body in the machine by impressing upon us the lack of presence as we dream of disembodied media or immaterial sustenance. They insist on the figure against the ground, not a figure over ground or ground over figure as the unconcealment of ground, but rather figure and ground—the system or economy of antinomy itself that necessitates an apparent surplus that gives more than the sum of its parts.