Moving at the speed of sight: before-and-after imagery in nineteenth-century American print culture and the acceleration of visual time

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the quickening pace of visual time in the nineteenth century from ‘slow’ portrayals, evidenced in long series showing gradual change over time, to ‘fast’ visual time conveyed through ‘before-and-after’ jump cuts. Drawing from film studies, it argues that popular image makers not only played a central role in creating innovative ways to represent people’s new experiences of accelerated time, but also, in the process, contributed to that acceleration themselves. Often using state-of-the-art printing and distribution technologies, image makers exposed Americans, and particularly nascent consumers, to ever-more-sophisticated forms of commercial representations that helped not only to accustom them to the faster pace and disorientation of mass transportation, communications, and production but also to embrace it. Radically different from their pictorial precursors, before-and-after images, which became common visual tropes late in the century, were key to this new temporality. Because they compressed time by distilling its passage into two succinct images – using what film historians refer to as ‘the cut’ – these illustrations did not simply function as innovative forms of commercial information selling specific goods. More significantly, they encouraged consumers to place themselves at the center of a much larger story of modernity, progress, and transformation.