Mr. Shull is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Lynchburg College. He
received his B.A. in Sociology from Syracuse University in 1967, and his
M.A. in Sociology from the same university in 1971, with a thesis on
"Newspapers and International Crises: a Content Analysis". He also pursued
graduate studies in anthropology at the University of Virginia, and in
sociology at Virginia Tech. From 1996-2001 he was chairman of the Sociology
Department at his college, and is now chairman and convener of the Asian
Studies Committee.

---

Stereophotography, the creation of a photographic image which produces the
illusion of a three-dimensional view, was part of the development of
photography which began in England and France in the late 1830s.
Stereophotography and the resulting stereographs, a.k.a. stereoviews,
became part of the American and European popular culture beginning in the
1850s.

In America and Europe entrepreneurs in the photography business sector
created a new and profitable income source through the mass production and
marketing-distribution of stereoviews of the world. Collections of those
stereographs were a part of the new middle-class America by the late 1800s.
Sets of those view cards were purchased by public libraries and were used
in educational settings as instruments for teaching geography,
anthropology, economics, history, etc.

For roughly half a century, those dual photographs mounted on stiff cards
were a primary medium which distributed images of Japan and the Japanese
across America, into American popular culture. This work examines two
different facets of that phenomenon. This presentation will first discuss,
briefly, the production and marketing of stereoviews of Japan in America
between those two points in time. This presentation will then consider the
different categories of images of the Japanese 'other' which became
available to the American mass public during those years.