Library of Congress Awards 2024-2025 National Stereoscopic Association Research Fellowships
The Library of Congress today announced Olivia Armandroff, Rebecca Hackemann, and Emily Mark-FitzGerald as its next class of fellows awarded the National Stereoscopic Association Research Fellowship.
Established in 2022 with a generous monetary donation from the National Stereoscopic Association, the fellowship supports research on stereoscopy and the history of photography within the Prints and Photographs Division holdings and the unparalleled photographic history collections at the Library of Congress – including over 15 million photographs, rare publications, manuscript materials and historic newspapers.
Stereographs are paired photographs that provide an illusion of three-dimensionality when placed in a special viewer called a stereoscope. They were among the first photographic entertainment formats that became popular from the Civil War to the early decades of the 20th century when new technologies like motion pictures captured the public’s attention. Recent technical innovations, including virtual reality, have brought renewed focus to both the history and continued use of the stereo format.
The Library’s Prints and Photographs Division is the premier research center for photographs in this format, holding stereographs dating from early daguerreotypes in the 1850s to published sets from the 1930s. Over 56,000 have been digitized and are available online at https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/stereo/.
National Stereoscopic Association Research Fellows
Olivia Armandroff, a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Southern California was awarded a one-week fellowship to conduct research related to her dissertation, “Volcanic Matter: Land Formation and Artistic Creation.” Armandroff’s work examines how artistic depictions of geological concepts of formation, sedimentation, and destruction have been used to represent the volcanic island chain of Hawaii over time. In their verisimilitude, stereographs of Kīlauea from the late-19th and early-20th centuries captivated armchair travelers and placed commercial photography in conversation with contemporary currents in landscape painting. Armandroff’s residency at the Library will allow close study of stereographic materials, as well as access to relevant manuscript and textual materials.
Rebecca Hackemann, professor of Photography at Kansas State University, was awarded a one-week fellowship for her project, “Moral Panic and New Technology Across Time.” Hackemann’s research analyzes and examines the tropes and visual language conventions used to depict changing technologies through photography to apply historical interactions with technology to the present day. The fellowship will allow study of the Library’s deep holdings of photographs, stereographs and prints that depict new technologies from the 1870s to the 1960s and social reactions to these inventions in newspapers and other print media. In addition to proposed publication, Hackeman aims to incorporate the results of her research in creation of an active VR environment from historical stereographs.
Emily Mark-FitzGerald, professor in the School of Art History & Cultural Policy at University College Dublin, was awarded a two-week fellowship to conduct research for her book “Irish Visual Culture, Social Conflict, and Crisis (c.1840-1900).” The work focuses on the intersection of two phenomena: innovations in visual technology and mass media from the 1840s, including stereoscopy, and episodes of social and political crisis like famine, poverty, emigration, and struggle that defined Irish experience across the long 19th century. The fellowship will allow Mark-FitzGerald to develop a chapter on emigration through stereographs of Ireland and accompanying guidebooks by American publishers marketed to a diasporic audience as a vehicle for nostalgia and reconnection with one’s homeland. In addition, Mark-FitzGerald will consult the Library’s extensive textual holdings on stereoscopy not available in Ireland.
The National Stereoscopic Association Research Fellowship is awarded annually by the Library. Additional information about the fellowship is available on the Prints & photographs Division home page: www.loc.gov/research-centers/prints-and-photographs.
The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, offering access to the creative record of the United States — and extensive materials from around the world — both on-site and online. It is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. The Library’s Prints and Photographs Division is the nation’s premier research center for stereo photography, holding stereographs dating from early stereo daguerreotypes to published sets submitted for copyright registration. Over 55,000 stereographs have been digitized and are available on the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog at loc.gov/pictures.
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PR 24-082
09/18/2024
ISSN 0731-3527