Kris Belden-Adams
In the 1840s, nude stereographic daguerreotype pornography (newly illegal to make or sell)
simulated the natural world with impeccable detail to reproduce the visual stimuli of texture
and tactility. Such images enabled viewers to be physically engaged with a representation of a
woman, as their act of looking simulates engrossed peeping through a keyhole – only without
the risk of getting caught by the subject of their voyeuristic gaze. Despite eforts to create a
convincing representation of reality using stereography and hand-painted color, they do not
allow a viewer to feel truly transported to another actual reality, nor do they bring about the
real-world consequences of such an act. Poses are awkward, high-art props are drained of their
connotations, and the experience of viewing a stereograph appeals only to the sense of sight.
Yet there is great safety in channeling sexual urges into an illusory, imaginative private realm.
Tensions between the representation and the real, the actual and the ideal, subject and object,
temporal and material, and between nature and artifice, are essential for a stereographic nude
photograph to meet customers’ needs: a safe, private fantasy which will not destabilize
marriages. This paper takes a closer look at the way two mid-19th-Century French
stereoscopic daguerreotypes embody the necessary tensions between “the real” and “the
represented” though their content and form.
