Seeing From Above: A Particular History of the General Observer

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes [1] For this reason, Graeme Davison describes the Crystal Palace as an inversion of Jeremy Bentham's architectural outline of the modern prison: "The Panopticon was designed so that everyone could be seen; the Crystal Palace was designed so that everyone could see" (7). [2] See, for example, Rydell, and Mitchell. [3] The official rhetoric and overall planning of the 1897 Stockholm Exhibition is described in detail in Ekström, Den utställda världen. [4] For a recent critique of the tendency to reduce the history of nineteenth‐century exhibitions to an effect (and the success) of "bourgeois imperialism", see Buzard, Childers and Gillooly (5–7). [5] For two very different examples, see Prendergast (chapter 3), and Byerly. [6] On the "comprehensive view" in nineteenth‐century literature, see, for example, Arac. [7] To a certain extent, this position also parallels the insider/outsider position that Buzard (10, 12) ascribes to the autoethnographic observation as performed in nineteenth‐century novels. [8] Letourneau is quoted from Connell (1523–1524). [9] The Swedish word "översikt" can be traced back to 1801, the adjective "översiktlig" to 1875 (Nationalencyklopedins ordbok 635–636). [10] See, for example, Rolt. [11] The role of ballooning in nineteenth‐century science communication is discussed by Olivotto. [12] Glaisher is quoted from Tucker (153). [13] Glaisher is quoted from Tucker (157). [14] Some of Nadar's thoughts on this are published in Nadar (34–36). [15] Nadar's essay Le Dessus et le dessous de Paris is quoted in the translation of Rice (173). [16] Rice (167) describes Nadar's photographs from the sewers as some of the most abstract images produced at this time. [17] See also "Hr Johansens ballongfärd", and "Ballongfärden från Industrihallen". [18] The Andrée expedition also circulated in other media than the newspapers. For instance, the open‐air museum close to the exhibition, Skansen, had displayed Andrée's balloon Svea, which was also exhibited at the Swedish Panoptikon. During the autumn of 1897 the expedition also became the subject of one of the displays at Madame Tussaud's Waxworks (Ekström, Den utställda världen 139–140). [19] See, for example, "Ryktet om Andrées ballong", and "Ballongfärden från Industrihallen." [20] See also Wigh, and "Oscar Halldins ballonguppstigning". Halldin's were not the first photographs of Stockholm taken from a balloon. These were made from a tethered balloon by Olof Kullberg in 1894. On that occasion the aim of the photographic experiment was described as military; see Johannesson, "Berättelsen om ballongen Svea". [21] For an enthusiastic report of the event offered by one of the spectators in the crowd, see Hasselgren (573). [22] According to Daston and Galison ("The Image of Objectivity" 81–84) it was not distrust of the reliability of the senses that motivated the ideal of mechanical objectivity but rather the effort to minimise the influence of the observer's personal characteristics in the representation of nature. The theoretical destabilisation of a disembodied observer has been located instead to the first half of the nineteenth century (Crary, Techniques of the Observer; cf. Ekström, "Konsten att se ett landskapspanorama" 150–153). Other researchers have argued that questions were raised about the position of the independent observer in the human sciences already during the eighteenth century (Fox 13–14). [23] Glaisher is quoted from Tucker (164). [24] Geddes is quoted from Yeo, The Contest for Social Science (231). [25] This educational rationality must not be confused with various attempts to organise a centralised "gaze". Although it is an intriguing fact that Jeremy Benthams architectural principles for surveillance, published in 1791, were contemporary with the invention of the panorama and the hot‐air balloon, the elevated position in the Panopticon was a model for internalised control, or a "discipline" to use Foucault's terminology, based on the certainty that everything in any individual life could be subject to observation. [26] Ekström, Den utställda världen, deals with this material at length. [27] This way of addressing the reader can be compared with what Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz (11) have referred to as "a language of transportation", a style of reporting that they associate with a special kind of direct television broadcast. However, similar tropes were also used in relation to earlier media to make the remote audience feel that it was present or taking part in the event. [28] This notion of the Stockholm Exhibition as a media archive is further explored in Ekström, Jülich and Snickars.