Description

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A transporting work of photographic history that offers a haunting vision of how Americans viewed the world at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Pull the yellowed card from the box and slide it into the viewer. Two binocular images, nearly identical, reveal a scene from the past in vivid, three-dimensional detail. Transcending space and time, the card shows the world as it existed in 1900, a moment when technology collapsed borders; when wars ignited between great powers; when natural forces brought disaster on surging, vulnerable cities—a moment very much like our own.

In 1900 the stereograph was king. Its three-dimensional optics created a virtual presence for the viewer. Millions of Americans, especially schoolchildren, absorbed ideas about race, class, and gender from such 3D images, the embodiment of the notion that “seeing is believing.” Drawing on an enormous, rarely seen collection of some 300,000 stereographic views spanning the first decade of the twentieth century, Michael Lesy presents nearly 250 images displaying a riot of peoples and cultures, stark class divisions, and unsettling glimpses of daily life a century ago.

Like Lesy’s landmark works of American macabre, Wisconsin Death Trip and Murder City, Looking Backward slides the reader into suspended animation. Haunting views of the early twentieth century’s most significant events at home and in the farthest reaches of the world—war, rebellion, industrial revolution, and natural catastrophe—flank pictures of the last remnants of the premodern natural world. Lesy’s evocative essays reassert the primacy of the stereograph in American visual history. He profiles the photographers who saw the world through their prejudices and the companies that sold their images everywhere. In underscoring the unnerving parallels between that period and our own, Looking Backward reveals a history that shadows us today.

About the Author

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Michael Lesy is one of America’s leading photographic scholars. His books include Wisconsin Death Trip, Murder City, Angel’s World, and Long Time Coming. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he teaches literary journalism at Hampshire College.

Praise For…

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Michael Lesy has long been known as our foremost photographic historian. With Looking Backward it is time to recognize him as an acerbic, paradoxical, poetic essayist. With a kind of cynical affection, he is, as no one since Mark Twain, absolutely alive to the always shifting imperatives of American know-how, inventiveness, tinkering, salesmanship, expansion, and disappearance.

— Greil Marcus

Lesy has forged his own niche, his own singular sub-genre of literary and journalistic social criticism via archival photographs… [Looking Backward] offers a sprawling and stunning snapshot of the world in the early years of the twentieth century.

— Jim Knipfel - The Believer

Engrossing….Looking Backward is an urgent lesson in how photography was used to teach the world what it needed to know.

— Andrew Holter - Brooklyn Rail

A fascinating collection, annotated in great detail, and certainly food for thought and meditation.
— State Magazine

It's a fantastic book... Fascinating, excellent production, featuring an archive of the world in the early 20th Century.
— Jonathan Blaustein - This Week in Photography

As a historian, Lesy finds a particular fascination in these photographs and how the scenes they depict highlight many of the same issues society grapples with today — from war and racism to environmental destruction and gross disparities in wealth.
— Steve Pfarrer - Amherst Bulletin