Exhibiting disasters: Mediation, historicity and spectatorship

http://mcs.sagepub.com/Media, Culture & Society

http://mcs.sagepub.com/content/34/4/472The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/0163443711436359

2012 34: 472Media Culture SocietyAnders Ekström

Exhibiting disasters: Mediation, historicity and spectatorship

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

can be found at:Media, Culture & SocietyAdditional services and information for

http://mcs.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

http://mcs.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

What is This?

- May 21, 2012Version of Record >>

at KANSAS STATE UNIV LIBRARIES on July 17, 2014mcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from at KANSAS STATE UNIV LIBRARIES on July 17, 2014mcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://mcs.sagepub.com/

http://mcs.sagepub.com/content/34/4/472

http://www.sagepublications.com

http://mcs.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

http://mcs.sagepub.com/subscriptions

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

http://mcs.sagepub.com/content/34/4/472.full.pdf

http://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtml



Media, Culture & Society34(4) 472 –487

© The Author(s) 2012Reprints and permission:

sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/0163443711436359

mcs.sagepub.com

Exhibiting disasters: Mediation, historicity and spectatorship

Anders EkströmStockholm, Sweden

AbstractThe main purpose of this article is to draw attention to a long-standing history of exhibiting disasters to distant audiences. In particular, the article explores the transregional imaginaries and cross-temporal connections that emerge from the history of what may be labelled the disaster display or disaster show. This refers to a particular genre of multimedia re-enactments of extreme events that developed in the context of temporary exhibitions and popular amusements in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Disaster displays typically involved visual representations, sound effects, fireworks, lectures and theatrical performances, and invited their audiences to experience a diversity of extreme events, for example distant wars, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, fire fighting and floods. In offering a blend of special effects and the thrills of authenticity, disaster shows copied and competed with, and sometimes incorporated, some of the traits of a variety of attractions in turn-of-the-century popular visual culture, such as serialized wax displays, moving panoramas and early film. The article especially investigates some of these intermedialities but it also discusses how the displays engaged and positioned the audience.

Keywordsdisasters, exhibitions, heritage of risk, historicity, mediation, spectatorship

Never before has an age been so informed about itself, if being informed means having an image of objects that resembles them in a photographic sense. (Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Die

Photographie’, 1927, in Kracauer, 1995)

Corresponding author:Anders Ekström, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) – Division of History of Science and Technology, Teknikringen 76, KTH, Stockholm SE-100 44, Sweden.Email: [email protected]

436359 MCS34410.1177/0163443711436359EkströmMedia, Culture & Society2012

Article

at KANSAS STATE UNIV LIBRARIES on July 17, 2014mcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from


Ekström 473

Transregional imaginaries, cross-temporal publics

At the turn of the 21st century, transregional imaginaries are defined to a staggering extent by the representation of disasters. Through the development of new information and com-munication technologies, global media networks and the increasing promiscuity of images (Buck-Morss, 2004), audiences all over the world are able to follow how floods, earth-quakes, famines, war and terrorism develop in real time and at long distances. Spectacular aesthetics have accordingly become more crucial than ever to risk management and to the conduct of war itself, as overwhelmingly documented in, for example, the distribution of ‘clinical footage’ in the Gulf war in the early 1990s or the mediatized choreography of the 11 September attacks in 2001. In ways that were unimaginable to audiences a century earlier, extreme events such as these are being enacted in a manner that presupposes the dubious notion of a global public.

My aim in this article is not, however, to add to the massive body of academic com-mentary on the exceptionality of these events. On the contrary, this study emanates from the rather startling observation that contemporary ways of confronting distant disasters are increasingly being defined by a certain ordinariness, which seems to confirm Ulrich Beck’s famous dictum that in risk society a state of emergency becomes the state of normalcy (Beck, 1992). For example, the website of the leading Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter offers its visitors moving images of extreme natural phenomena and sites of catastrophes on an almost daily basis. Next to local news, sports results and advertisements, web-TV clips from all around the world are introduced in a repetitive manner that unavoidably collapses into a provocative rhetoric of ‘the same’. On 18 October 2010: ‘See the super typhoon hit the Philippines’; 26 October 2010: ‘See the unique pictures from within the tornado’; 27 October 2010: ‘See the devastation after the eruption’; 28 October 2010: ‘See images from Tsunami-stricken Sumatra’; 29 October 2010: ‘See the volcano spew fire and ashes’.1 In this desk format, the perception of distant disasters is literally miniaturized and no longer defined by the sublime, that is a spectatorial position oriented towards the fear, unforesee-ability and magnitude of the exceptional event (cf. Nye, 1994), but rather by the wow effect that is commonly considered a key element of successful web design.

How did this tendency to exhibit disastrous events as part of the ordinary come about? To what extent does it reflect a more matter-of-fact attitude towards apocalyptic imagery? And how does the daily flow of disaster reports correspond to a profound and yet unnoticed change in the politics of risk discourse, moving away from a language of management and avoidance to one of preparedness, resilience and mitigation (Amin, forthcoming: ch. 6)?

With the intention of framing a temporal horizon in these contemporary concerns, this article identifies a recurrent tension between repetition and disruption in the history of representing catastrophes across media and geographical borders. It is suggested that this tension is key to the double address of spectacular aesthetics itself in inviting on the one hand a mode of spectatorship oriented towards the disruptive experience of shock and special effects, and on the other engaging audiences in the mechanical aspects of remedia-tion through which disastrous events are disconnected from their origins. Without sug-gesting a simple historical transition from an aesthetics of disruption to one of repetition, it is argued that contemporary modes of mediating disasters testify to a tendency to draw the sublime into the domain of the ordinary, and thereby make disruption and repetition overlap or even merge. The same tension is also at the heart of how representations of



474 Media, Culture & Society 34(4)

disasters negotiate the rhythms of history. Consider, for example, the competing tempo-ralities involved in narratives and visual reports that singularize extreme events and yet draw on genres developed over time and across media.

The speed and frequency of today’s transmission of extreme events across borders and media are nonetheless unprecedented in history. But it would be a severe mistake to conceive of these developments as one effect of new information and communication technologies alone. Transregional imaginaries are culturally defined and the constraints and possibilities created by various media are merely one aspect of a more complex phe-nomenon. Thus, the extent to which representation of disasters has come to define con-temporary transnationalism is also the result of the interconnectedness between events created by the major themes that are shaping current perceptions of the world. This means that the disruptive nature of extreme events is routinized and made familiar in a histori-cally specific way, especially through the lens of climate change. For example, in 2010 this made distant audiences likely to link floods in Pakistan to fires in Russia, using climate to interpret one disaster in the context of distant others.

But there is also a cross-temporal and aesthetic interconnectedness in the ways in which disasters are transnationally mediated, and it is this aspect in particular that this article highlights. In her book The Spectatorship of Suffering, Lilie Chouliaraki argues: ‘It is this element of historicity that many contemporary accounts of media and mediation lack’; however, news discourse on distant suffering always ‘draws on historical themes and genres that have come to define our collective imaginary of the “other”’ (2006: 8). I share this general analytical approach; and indeed, intertextual and transmedial aspects have often been the focus of historical research on spectacular realism and news melodrama (see e.g. Booth, 1981; Schwartz, 1998; Singer, 2001). This article contributes to that particular field of historical investigation, especially by tracing some of the mixed media practices that were involved in exhibiting disasters to large and distant audiences in 19th- and early 20th-century visual culture. But it also stresses the general importance of explor-ing the historicity of discussions of contemporary media that tend to be too preoccupied with singularizing the present moment (cf. Ekström et al., 2011).

As indicated by numerous past and present instances, by written and visual sources, and not least by our own experience, we also know that an intricate mix of myth and his-tory works as an indispensable resource in narrating extreme events across various media (see e.g. Janku et al., 2011; Kerner, 2007; Stock and Stott, 2007). Representations of past disasters should therefore, I suggest, be thought of as a crucial asset in the cultures of disaster response that characterize different eras (cf. Rojecki, 2009). For example, in the wake of the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, distant reports on the catastrophe not only made sense of the event in biblical and apocalyptic terms but also by referring to previous disasters. In Voltaire’s novel Candide (2005 [1759]), Pangloss explains to his pupil Candide that the catastrophe was linked to a recent earthquake in Lima. When the city of Messina was devastated by an earthquake three decades later, representations of the Lisbon catas-trophe in turn provided much-needed contextualization (Broberg, 2005).

Apart from the aesthetic and comparative presence of previous disasters in the repre-sentation of more recent ones, there is another and more pressing reason for stressing the historicity of these issues. In no other period in history has humanity been able to act upon distant futures to the same extent as today, and in no other period in history have we been as aware of the impact of our actions on future societies as today. It has become just as



Ekström 475

necessary to ask whether the transregional circulation of extreme events constructs a ‘broader “we”’ that transcends geographical boundaries, to use Chouliaraki’s words (2006: 10), as to develop a sense of a cross-temporal ‘we,’ or, in other words, to imagine publics with the ability to cut across time as much as space. This necessitates new ways of theo-rizing the temporalities of history, new ways of invoking the past as well as the future as ‘actants’ in contemporary matters of concern, to borrow from Bruno Latour’s (2005) language. Given that the present is the history of the future, and that history is the mode of reflection by which humans engage in cross-temporal communities, we should therefore ask: How can historical analysis affect our way of relating to future societies? To what extent can history in this sense be ‘future-driven’?

Drawing on the work of Luc Boltanski (1999) among others, scholars in different fields have taken a renewed interest in exploring the moral and affective aspects of spectatorship (see e.g. Cartwright, 2008; Chouliaraki, 2008). This article may in some respects be read as an attempt to expand that discourse in a historical direction. The most straightforward purpose, however, is to draw attention to a long-standing history of exhibiting disasters to distant audiences. In particular, the article explores the transnational imaginaries and cross-temporal connections that emerge from the history of what may be labelled the disaster display or disaster show. This refers to a particular genre of multimedia re-enactments of extreme events that developed in the context of temporary exhibitions and popular amuse-ments in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Disaster displays typically involved visual representations, sound effects, fireworks, lectures and theatrical performances, and invited their audiences to experience a diversity of extreme events, for example distant wars, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, fire fighting and floods. In offering a blend of special effects and the thrills of authenticity, disaster shows copied and competed with, and some-times incorporated, some of the traits of a variety of attractions in turn-of-the-century popular visual culture, such as serialized wax displays, moving panoramas and early film. The article especially investigates some of these intermedialities, but it will also discuss how the displays engaged and positioned the audience. Starting on a transnational although western scale, sketching out how disaster displays related to earlier mediascapes from the late 18th century and onwards, the discussion will eventually zoom in on a very local and yet transregional event: the staging at a temporary exhibition in Stockholm in 1909 of a flood that occurred in 1889 in a small Pennsylvanian town, an event soon to be known as the Johnstown Flood. The conclusion returns to the more speculative issues of time, distance and historicity, suggesting that transregional imaginaries constructed in relation to distant disasters can be seen as forming part of a cross-temporal heritage of risk society.

Disaster shows

More than anywhere else, the disaster shows proliferated in the context of turn-of-the-century amusement grounds. At Coney Island outside New York, re-creations of disastrous events became one of the main attractions in the early 20th century. During this period Coney Island had three amusement parks: Steeplechase Park (opened in 1897), Luna Park (1903) and Dreamland (1904). Among the shows offered at Luna Park in its first years were recreations of both the 1889 Johnstown Flood and the 1900 Galveston Flood, a storm that killed thousands of people and destroyed large parts of the Texas town (Immerso, 2002; Kasson, 1978: 71–2).




In some cases, disaster displays re-enacted national events to a nationally defined audience, thereby oscillating between the production of spectacle and heritage. One example of a sub-genre that was heavily injected with patriotic sentiment can be found in re-enactments celebrating firemen as local heroes. Recurrent in adventure stories and melodrama such as Robert Michael Ballantyne’s Fighting the Flames (1867), this motif became extremely popular across various media in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, combining thrill and local trauma by reflecting the damage that fires regularly caused to contemporary cities and ‘the innate theatricality of fires and fire-fighting – their spectacular, dramatic, and melodramatic characteristics’ (Stulman Dennet and Warnke, 1990: 106). Not surprisingly, this was also a recurrent theme in film actualities around 1900, and while some of these films contained scenes from actual disasters others remediated re-enactments of fires from amusement grounds. For example, Fighting the Flames, a film produced by Biograph in 1905, showed scenes from one of the fire spectacles that attracted audiences to Coney Island’s amusement park Dreamland, turning the film into a deliberate ‘docu-mentary of the theatrical event’ (Stulman Dennett and Warnke, 1990: 108).

For many years, the shows ‘Fire and Flames’ and ‘Fighting the Flames’ were among the most successful at Coney Island (Sally, 2006). The scale of the spectacle was an attraction in itself. For example, ‘Fighting the Flames’ engaged 2000 performers as well as professional firemen, and occupied a stage 250 feet long and 100 feet deep (Stulman Dennet and Warnke, 1990: 104). The spectators were incorporated into the scene, playing the part of the gazing onlookers in the street. This arrangement turned them into perform-ers in the displays, a pattern of audience involvement that was developed, among other

Figure 1. ‘Fighting the Flames’, Dreamland, Coney Island, c. 1905



Ekström 477

places, in the historical re-enactments and amusement grounds at late 19th-century world’s fairs (Ekström, 2011) and in open-air museums such as Skansen in Stockholm (see e.g. Sandberg, 2003). Fire spectacles also shared some of the techniques of earlier panoramas and wax displays that worked to dissolve the boundary between audience and stage, especially in the creative use of authentic props (see e.g. Ekström, 2009: 189, 2010: 163–4; Sandberg, 2003: 103–4; Singer, 2001: 50). In both respects, the shows testified to the overall theatricality of display. Visitors to fin-de-siècle temporary exhibitions and amuse-ment grounds were often expected to move through entire milieus and to become performers in the displays. In this way, on the whole these exhibitions created involvement in the displays through affect and physical presence as much as making the audience adhere to a particular script or ideology (Ekström, 2010, 2011; Sandberg, 2011).

But the disaster shows at Coney Island and elsewhere were not restricted to local themes or national events. On the contrary, by enabling events that were remote in both time and space to travel across media and geographical borders disaster displays shared the trans-national orientation that characterized late 19th- and early 20th-century amusement indus-tries in general (see e.g. Ekström, 2010; Kessler and Verhoeff, 2007). The difference in this respect between turn-of-the-century ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural production is indeed striking, although the distinction between the two was never as clear-cut as we sometimes tend to think. While one of the key characteristics – or perhaps one should say the key characteristic – of late 19th-century arts and museums was the construction of traditions and institutions defined in national terms, the distribution and aesthetics of popular visual cultures and new media had an increasingly transnational character. Accordingly, the history of amusement grounds and sideshows can in this respect be thought of as a non-institutional but transnationally oriented mode of cultural production, not only because of the distributional patterns and privileged themes of the shows but more importantly so for the way they addressed their audiences’ transregional imaginaries.

Among the Coney Island shows that depicted more remote events in both time and space was a display of the volcanic eruption of Mount Pelée on the island of Martinique in 1902, and a re-enactment of what was probably the most frequently mediated catastrophe in the 19th century, the fall of Pompeii (Kasson, 1978: 71). Starting with the excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii in the 1730s and 1740s, Mount Vesuvius and its surround-ings became a celebrated stop in the European Grand Tour, adding to the early history of disaster tourism (Broberg, 2005).2 Throughout the 19th century, the devastation of Pompeii was recreated in numerous novels and stage melodramas, with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Last Days of Pompeii from 1834 as the best-known example. But it was primar-ily in panoramas and disaster shows that mass audiences encountered the imaginary power of volcanoes and especially Mount Vesuvius (see e.g. Comment, 1999: 8, 26).3 Given the frequency with which the fall of Pompeii was recreated during the 19th century one could in fact argue that the excavations in the 18th century were unearthing the spectacle of catastrophe as much as the historical remnants of a lost city.

A theatrical re-enactment of the fall of Pompeii was already one of the attractions for visitors to Coney Island in the 1880s. Henry James Paine, an entertainments entrepreneur who specialized in fireworks shows, had a tremendous success with a spectacle showing the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the city of Pompeii being buried ‘beneath torrents of blazing magnesium powder’ (Snow, 1984: 45, quoted in Stulman Dennett and Warnke, 1990: 103). Later on, I will quote some further examples of how this motif travelled




across various media in late 19th-century popular visual culture. So far, it is enough to conclude that the ways in which historical disasters, and especially the last days of Pompeii, affected the representation of more recent and contemporary events, testify both to the historicity of disaster displays and the processes of intermediality at work in the genre itself.

Multimedia re-enactments of war and natural disasters, including scale models of volcanoes, also became a recurrent feature of late 19th- and early 20th-century world’s fairs (see e.g. Nye, 1994: 213). From the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and onwards, the separate amusement grounds, or Midways, in world’s fairs estab-lished a pattern that was copied and further developed in parks such as Coney Island. For example, the amusement and concession zone of the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair, known as the Pike, presented its visitors with recreations of the Galveston flood, fire fighting and naval battles (see e.g. Gunning 1994: 433–4).

However, the most spectacular show at the Pike was the Anglo-Boer War concession, which engaged several hundred war veterans and actors in a series of recreations of scenes from the second Boer war of 1899–1902, including army parades, major battles and native villages. This show was later restaged at Coney Island in an arena accommodating more than 10,000 spectators. The re-enactments engaged approximately 1000 soldiers and actors, including ‘“real” Africans’ hired to ‘add “authenticity”’ to the production (Stulman Dennett and Warnke, 1990: 103). Thus, in spite of the enormous scale of these events, they shared the overall tendency of emergent transnational amusement industries to give priority to attractions that could be transported between various sites and contexts. In much the same way as the reconstruction of contemporary floods and earthquakes, the Boer War show was also invested with the added value of intermediality as audiences were able to compare the re-enactments with depictions of the war in, for example, film actualities or photographs in the press (cf. Popple, 2002, 2005).

Figure 2. ‘The Last Days of Pompeii,’ Manhattan Beach, Coney Island, 1885



Ekström 479

But then again, the techniques used in the disaster displays to produce the combined attraction of authenticity and special effects were elaborated in relation to both new and old media. The theatrical practices inherent in the displays were most apparent in their performative style but also characterized by expert use of props, fireworks, sound and lighting techniques, as well as various mechanical devices. In search of precursors of 19th-century panoramas and dioramas, Richard Altick describes the work of the landscape painter and stage designer Philip James de Loutherbourg. In the 1780s, Loutherbourg developed a show for Leicester Square in London, famously known as the Eidophusikon but more plainly announced as ‘Various Imitations of Natural Phenomena, represented by Moving Pictures’ (Altick, 1978: 117–27). It exemplified a more general interest in the late 18th century in exploring theatrical techniques in the recreation of disasters and the terrifying sublimity of natural phenomena (see e.g. Broberg, 2005).

Loutherbourg used an advanced combination of lighting and sound effects, three-dimen-sional models, pulleys and mirrors to create illusions that were as authentic as possible. According to Altick, the stage design especially impressed contemporary audiences by the exact interplay between sound effects and visual impressions. Typical motifs were violent storms, shipwrecks and waterfalls; one scene, for example, depicted the Niagara Falls. Interestingly enough, this was a fascination with the movement of water that these scenes shared not only with romantic painters but also with the trick culture of early film. Another topic explored by Loutherburg was volcanic eruptions (Altick, 1978: 121–6).

The viewing positions produced in the Eidophusikon also shared some of the character-istics of turn-of-the-century disaster displays. Most importantly, this similarity consisted in the double address of the shows. For however much spectators were expected to lose them-selves in the realism of the display, they were also invited to admire the complex machinery that produced the illusionary effects. Accordingly, what Ben Singer aptly refers to as ‘the pleasure of the trick’ and an ‘apperceptive aesthetic of medium-awareness’ was not introduced with new and hi-tech stagecraft designed for turn-of-the-century melodrama but rather grew out of practices that developed over an extended period of time (Singer, 2001: 178, 182).

In sum, these attractions contributed to a mode of realism which foregrounded the media-tized character of the display rather than the transparency of the representations. The scale of the events, on the other hand, was completely different. While the Eidophusikon miniatur-ized the spectacles of nature, and created a very intimate and exclusive atmosphere for its audience, disaster displays impressed by their magnitude and capacity to transgress conven-tional theatrical space, also in relation to the visitors. In both cases, however, the very shifting of scales, which creatively negotiated the cultural meanings of miniaturizing and enlarging things and people (cf. Stewart, 1993), were an important aspect of the performance. Indeed, various scaling techniques characterized in many ways the multimedial space of turn-of-the-century temporary exhibitions and amusement grounds in general (Ekström, 2008, 2009).

Disaster at a distance

At the end of May 1889, a flood devastated Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a coal and steel town of about 10,000 inhabitants. The disaster was the combined result of heavy rainstorms and the ensuing destruction of a man-made lake created for the exclusive leisure activities of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. Located 15 miles above Johnstown, the lake emptied in less than an hour when the inadequately supported dam broke and its water




struck the valley below with a force estimated to equal the full power of the Niagara Falls. The consequences were horrendous. People and animals were swept away along with complete buildings and railway carriages. When the flood reached Johnstown it all crashed into a massive railroad bridge, which acted as a dam and forced the water back into the town. Explosions and fires followed and when the flood finally receded more than 2200 people had lost their lives (Godbey, 2006: 274–7).

The Johnstown Flood was soon transformed into one of the major media events of the late 19th century, distributed not only locally but also to remote audiences and for decades to follow. It was to be repeatedly re-enacted in turn-of-the-century exhibition grounds and amusement parks, connecting the story of real disaster to the conventions of melodrama and the spectacular realism that emerged from performing disasters at a distance. In the days immediately after the flood, however, the event was circulated through smaller and faster media. The town and its surroundings were thronged with photographers, reporters and souvenir hunters looking for thrills and profit. A few days into June 1889, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported: ‘The woods are full of photographers taking pictures and distributing their cards’ (quoted in Godbey, 2006: 286). Conflicts soon arose regarding copyright issues and travel arrangements to the site, and visitors were approached by people literally offer-ing to sell pieces of the devastated town. In this context, the Johnstown Flood also became an episode in the history of late 19th-century disaster tourism (Godbey, 2006).

But here I would like to focus on a later and more distant re-enactment of the flood. In 1909, a temporary exhibition organized in Stockholm contained for the first time a specially designed amusements area, copying on a less sizeable scale the patterns that grew out of the midways at 19th-century world’s fairs (Ekström, 2010, 2011). One of the concessions at the 1909 Stockholm Exhibition was a show announced as ‘The Fall of Johnstown’ (Johnstowns undergång). To the ‘highly medium-aware’ and knowledgeable local audiences of turn-of-the-century popular visual culture (Singer, 2001: 185; see also

Figure 3. ‘The Great Conemaugh Valley Disaster – Flood & Fire at Johnstown, Pa’, Subtitle: ‘Hundreds Roasted Alive at the Railroad Bridge’Source: Reproduced from a lithograph published in 1890 and produced by the Chicago publisher Kurz and Allison.



Ekström 481

Beegan, 2008; Ekström, 2011), the title linked the show to attractions announced in similar ways, the recurrent display of ‘The Fall of Pompeii’ being one example. Indeed, a decade earlier a 360-degree panorama entitled ‘The Destruction of Pompeii’ (Pompejs Förstöring) was presented in a rotunda built for the purpose close to the location of the 1909 Stockholm Exhibition (Abrahamsson, 1992).

The Johnstown show was housed in its own building and run by Joseph Menschen, one of the travelling entrepreneurs who visited Stockholm for the exhibition. He was assisted by a group of people who, in ads and reviews, were commonly referred to as ‘Mr Menschen’s negroes’, and who also played music outside the entrance. Commenting as much on their language, gestures, manners and garments, as on the concessions, it is clear from contem-porary reports that the people working these shows were considered part of the attraction. It is equally clear that the entrepreneurs themselves exploited the stereotypes of exoticism skilfully.4 In addition, the amusements at the 1909 Stockholm Exhibition were amazingly often described as of an undecidedly ‘foreign origin’ in general, a rhetoric that worked effectively in two completely different ways. Not only did this rhetoric add to the thrill and commercial value of the concessions, it also separated the amusements from the rest of the exhibition, which was aptly called The White City, borrowing the ‘colour-line’ from the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago (Ekström, 2010: 183–6).

The walls of the pavilion housing the Johnstown show were covered with lengthy advertising copy, and in bold letters passers-by could read the words ‘SEE’ and ‘LISTEN’, promising a multisensorial experience for those who entered. According to the manager himself, the scenes inside were the largest of their kind ever shown in Scandinavia. He also explained that his invention could just as easily be used to reconstruct the 1908 earthquake in Messina. The organizers of the amusement area enthusiastically supported Menschen’s advertising stunts. Thus, the official report from the 1909 Stockholm Exhibition described the Johnstown show as a genuinely original and American idea, ‘an authentic import from the great metropolis of the world’.5 The pavilion met with great interest and was visited by approximately 100,000 fairgoers from the end of June to September (Carlsson, 1910: 203–7; cf. Nyheterna från Konstindustri-utställningen, 1909a, 1909b).

Unfortunately, to envisage the interior of the pavilion we have to trust written reports. The reconstruction of the flood was accomplished by a combination of three-dimensional screens, paintings, models, lighting and sound effects, accompanied by a lecturer who told the story of the Johnstown disaster in a melodramatic fashion. A news item in the official journal of the 1909 exhibition described the result as follows:

On a stage 84 feet wide, one is allowed to see the unfortunate town before, during and after the catastrophe. The factories are running, trains come and go, day shifts into night, complete with the sun, dusk, moon and stars, the rain is pouring, thunder rumbles and there is dreadful lightning; suddenly, a dam in a mountain lake bursts from the pressure and the water rushes down from the hills, drowning and destroying everything that comes in its way. And then one sees the town after the catastrophe, parts of it in ruins, parts of it untouched. (Nyheterna från Konstindustri-utställningen, 1909a)6

Adding to the authenticity conveyed by the performance, a woman working at the exhibition had been an eye-witness of the flood. Interviewed about her experiences she explained that the ‘depiction’ (afbildningen) was not at all close to the original (Carlsson, 1910: 204). Also,




it was clear from numerous reviews of the Johnstown show that the focus of attention was as much on the stage machinery as the truthfulness of the storyline. Accordingly, the realism of the display was judged by the extent to which the spectators were absorbed by the illu-sionary effects produced, not in relation to issues of historical correctness. A similar pattern of reception has been established in relation to contemporary melodrama, with reviewers complaining that the sensational effects were never realized (Singer, 2001: 170–1).

To what extent, then, did ‘The Fall of Johnstown’ fulfil such expectations? Quoting the advertisements stating that the show represented ‘the most magnificent electrome-chanical spectacle of our times’, one reviewer continued rather laconically by saying that at least parts of the performance deserved special mention: ‘The representation of the town in flames is especially splendid and illusory.’7 Also, the show had been improved by changes made since the opening (Nyheterna från Konstindustri-utställningen, 1909b). This reminds us that this kind of display was the subject of a process of continuous edit-ing. (Actually, when referring to a particular display at turn-of-the-century temporary exhibitions one should strictly speaking indicate the date of performance, as when quoting a continuously updated web page. In practice, this is of course impossible.) In consequence, the show was ideally open to audience involvement on a day-to-day basis. One result of this comprised the changes made in response to reactions of the spectators when the illu-sion failed. In several reviews, the voice of the lecturer was identified as a weakness so that he was later replaced (Nyheterna från Konstindustri-utställningen, 1909b):

We adults may have smiled a little when we watched the soldiers marching away like tin soldiers drawn by a string or when the lecturer, who was fighting the unbridled rage of the elements with his sonorous voice, became too pathetic in his lyrical depiction of the fate that fell upon the unfortunate town. (Carlsson, 1910: 204)8

The visibility of the multimedial stagecraft of the Johnstown display was further empha-sized by transmedial comparisons. By the creative use of different techniques to work on scale, proportions, distance and time, the scenes produced were linked to an aesthetic of attraction that characterized the amusement area at large as well as parts of the exhibition. The show’s closeness to related media was frequently commented on in the reviews. One of these texts contained a contemporary comparison of the soundscape of the performance to the sound from a phonograph. The same author went on to compare the overall impres-sion of ‘The Fall of Johnstown’ with:

a refined wax cabinet, or a perfection of the simpler kind of panorama that can be seen through peepholes at popular fun-fairs [which depict] the most terrible revolutions in nature, the most frightful explosions, the most dreadful fires, and the most gruesome mass slaughters. (Carlsson, 1910: 204–5)9

In sum, the recreation of catastrophes and extreme events took many forms in 19th- and early 20th-century popular visual culture, from open-air re-enactments that engaged thousands of actors to theatrical shows and miniaturized views in stereoscopic images. By depicting geographically and historically remote disasters, all of these media addressed the transnational imaginaries of the spectators. In discussing the Pike, the amusements area at the St Louis World’s Fair in 1904, Tom Gunning (1994: 436–8) points to the mas-sive amount of travel attractions offered to the visitors. Like moving panoramas



Ekström 483

representing distant places or the frequent reconstructions of exotic native villages and historical sites, the re-enactments of fires, battle scenes, floods, volcanoes and earthquakes could be thought of as an effortless and technologically updated mode of virtual travel, or perhaps more precisely, of virtual disaster tourism. In a similar vein, Luna Park on Coney Island has been described as a ‘Cook’s tour in miniature’ (Kasson, 1978: 70). But it is important not to overdo this point. As indicated by the reviews quoted in this article, the spectators of ‘The Fall of Johnstown’ and similar shows were equally involved in transmedial comparisons, judging the performance of one disaster in the context of others, and thereby connecting events and mediations that were remote in time as well as space.

A heritage of risk

Closer to the area suffering from the disaster, and immediately after the event and through-out the 20th century, the Johnstown Flood was memorialized in numerous books and films that productively combined the rich collection of photographs, contemporary accounts and interviews with survivors. This continues today, one example being the 2003 film Johnstown Flood with actor Richard Dreyfuss as narrator. In 1989, to mark the centennial of the disaster, the Johnstown Flood Museum was opened by the Johnstown Area Heritage Association. There are certain continuities between these more recent displays of the flood and their early 20th-century forerunners, especially in the way they address their audi-ences. The virtual tour of the Johnstown Flood Museum is introduced by an image showing an installation of the debris on one of the museum’s walls that comes close to the most widely circulated photographs from the disaster. The multimedia map illustrating the timeline and the path of the water is described as presenting the visitors with ‘[l]ight and sound effects’ produced by modern technology.10 In 2011, the museum launched a new exhibition on how contemporary media portrayed the flood, focusing on the infamous sensationalism of late 19th-century ‘new journalism’. Going back to the 2003 film version of the flood, one of at least two available versions of the DVD cover promises to deliver new remediations (‘as seen on television’) as well as authentic effects (‘first-hand accounts from survivors’). However, this film could also draw on a series of earlier productions, among them the silent movie The Johnstown Flood from 1926 starring Janet Gaynor. Again, the distinctions between heritage and popular cultural production, between spec-tacular aesthetics and institutional memory practices, between thrill and trauma, are not very clear-cut in these matters. As discussed by Marita Sturken (2007), this also proves to be true in relation to more recent catastrophes in US history.

Most importantly, however, the particular case of the Johnstown Flood also exemplifies how the element of historicity in the representation of disasters, which was referred to at the beginning of this article, works in two opposite directions. Not only are past disasters used as a resource in representing more recent ones; past disasters may in turn be recharged with new meaning by contemporary events. In relation to the transmedial historiography of the Johnstown Flood this was exemplified in March 2010 when the play A True History of the Johnstown Flood premiered at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. In the publicity it was declared that the play was inspired by the Indian Ocean tsunami and ‘the devasta-tion brought on by Hurricane Katrina’. The plot told the story of the Baxter Theatre Troupe, who had been engaged to perform in an exclusive resort next to the reservoir that was about to burst in the rainstorm. Thematically, the play centred on how the Johnstown




Flood exposed the social structure of contemporary society, but also on how catastrophes in general might breed social change and even revolutions. Interestingly, the play com-prised audio-visual special effects that were not totally unlike the stagecraft used in the-atrical turn-of-the-century disaster shows. Unfortunately, the performance was not very well received and the play closed earlier than expected.11

What possibilities, then, exist in the transregional imaginaries created through the history of exhibiting distant disasters? In relation to risks and hazards, the challenge to today’s societies does not necessarily lie in speeding up technological innovation or increasing knowledge of how contemporary ways of living affect future societies, but rather in exploring the possibility of new kinds of publics that cross time as much as space. Thus, it is in its capacity to cultivate a certain sense of the cross-temporal interconnectedness of the world – and not in individual responses to particular images – that I propose to locate the question of ‘moral spectatorship’ in relation to the rep-resentation of disasters. The history of disaster displays sketched out in this article offers an abundance of techniques to create affective and empathetic modes of spec-tatorship. No doubt this fostered a media-related expertise as well as a transnational orientation among the audiences, but it would be flawed to ask whether this created a more or less responsible attitude towards distant suffering. Rather, the historicity of these mediations should draw our attention to the general importance of the cultural aspects of disaster response.

This brings me back to the more speculative issues of time, distance and historicity that were raised in the introduction. For several decades, historical research on colonial-ism, slow and long-term processes of globalization, as well as the complex negotiations of transnational relations have completely altered our understanding of the ways in which cultural and political processes transgress geographical borders. As a result, places, powers and practices once considered separate have been drawn into each other’s domains and started to act upon each other in historical analysis. But just as much as this line of inves-tigation needs to be continued, it has become equally important to explore new ways of approaching issues of cross-temporal connections and the very temporalities of history. For just as the history of colonialism can be detailed in the practices by which colonial powers act upon distant places, there is a history to be detailed in the practices by which the present acts upon distant futures.

The representation of disasters across media and geographical borders intervenes in the history of transregional imaginaries to the same extent that the temporalities that interact in the way disasters are culturally negotiated intervene in the sense of historical time. And ultimately this is what I have tried to tease out of this material: a sense of cross-temporal connections, of how the ‘element of historicity’ itself can be conceived of as cultural common ground, shared between the past, the present and the future, of how disaster response has been recurrently defined by the ambiguous tension between disruption and repetition. The displays and re-enactments of man-made and natural disasters (cf. Leikam, 2009) that have been discussed in this article are indeed an integral part of what I suggest should be thought of as the long-term heritage of risk societies. The cultural aspects of societal resilience continue to be understated in today’s policies on the management of hazards and risks. Research across disciplines has emphasized how the management of risks in past and present societies sediments itself in the land-scape as well as institutions and technological infrastructures. But it is also, I suggest,



Ekström 485

sedimented in the collective imaginaries of ourselves and the distant ‘other’. Working out how this heritage of risk operates in the intersection between the cultural and the material, between history and nature, and how it connects distant places and distant times, and perhaps also the fictional and the real, could be one way of approaching the issue of how to activate a strengthened sense of the cross-temporal connectedness of the present.

Notes

1. These are all headlines introducing web-TV clips at www.dn.se, the website of Dagens Nyheter. In the original, the quotes read: ‘Se supertyfonen dra in över Filippinerna’ (18 October 2010); ‘Se de unika bilderna inifrån Tornadon’ (26 October; referring to a tornado in northern Texas); ‘Se förödelsen efter utbrottet’ (27 October 2010; referring to the volcanic eruption in Java, Indonesia); ‘Se bilder från Tsumanidrabbade Sumatra’ (28 October 2010); ‘Se vulkanen spy eld och aska’ (29 October 2010; again, the headline refers to the activities of the volcanic mountain Merapi in Java.) All quotes are translated by the author.

2. In this context, I prefer to use the term ‘disaster tourism’, which seems more inclusive and not as dependent on modern developments as the term ‘dark tourism’ (see Lennon and Foley, 2000; Sharpley and Stone, 2009).

3. Adding to the transmediality of these events, it has been suggested that John Burford’s Panorama of Pompeii that was displayed in Leicester Square in London in the 1820s was probably ‘the first source of inspiration’ for ‘the panoramalike prose style Bulwer employed’ (Oettermann, 1997: 360).

4. In the grafter and pitcher Philip Allingham’s autobiography Cheapjack (2010), there are some striking examples of how people working the British fairgrounds in the 1920s and 1930s skil-fully performed foreignness, for example by using fake accents or being dressed in a particular way.

5. In the original, the quote reads: ‘en äkta import från de stora världsstäderna’. 6. The Swedish original reads:

På en 84 fot bred scen får man se den olyckliga staden före, under och efter katastrofen. Fabrikerna arbeta, tåg komma och gå, dygnet växlar med sol, skymning, måne och stjärnor, regnet strömmar, åskan bullrar och blixtrar alldeles fasligt; plötsligt brister dammen i en bergsjö för vattenmassans påtryckning och vattnet störtar ned från bergen, dränkande och nedbrytande allt i sin väg. Och sedan får man se staden efter katastrofen, en del i ruiner, medan den andra står orörd.

7. The original quotes read: ‘vår tids mest storartade elektromekaniska skådespel’ and ‘Särskildt praktfull och illusorisk är framställningen av staden i lågor.’

8. In the original, the quote reads:

Vi vuxna drogo kanske litet på mun när vi sågo krigarna marschera iväg som tennsoldater dragna med ett snöre eller när föreläsaren, som med sin sonora stämma kämpade med elementens löss- släppta raseri, blef alltför patetisk i sin lyriska skildring af de öden som drabbade den arma staden.

9. In the original, the quote reads:

något slags förädladt vaxkabinett eller en fullkomning af det enklare panorama, som man å folknöjesplatserna ser genom en tittglugg’[...] ‘de hemskaste naturrevolutioner, rysansvärdaste explosioner, förfärligaste eldsvådor och kusligaste mass-slaktningar.

10. See: www.jaha.org/FloodMuseum/oklahoma.html11. See: www.chicagostagereview.com/?p=10573




References

Abrahamsson Å (1992) Panoramats skenvärld – 1800-talets bildteatrar (The illusionary world of panoramas – 19th-century picture theatres). Stadsvandringar 15: Stockholms stadsmuseum (City Walks 15: The Stockholm City Museum). Stockholm: Stockholms stadsmuseum.

Allingham P (2010 [1934]) Cheapjack: Being the True History of a Young Man’s Adventures as a Fortune-teller Grafter, Knocker-worker, and Mounted Pitcher on the Market-places and Fair-grounds of a Modern but Still Romantic England. Essex: Golden Duck.

Altick R (1978) The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Amin A (forthcoming) Land of Strangers. Cambridge: Polity Press.Ballantyne RM (1867) Fighting the Flames: A Tale of the London Fire Brigade. London: Nisbet.Beck U (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Ritter M. London: Sage.Beegan G (2008) The Mass Image: A Social History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian

London. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Boltanski L (1999) Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.Booth M (1981) Victorian Spectacular Theatre, 1850–1910. Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Broberg G (2005) Tsunamin i Lissabon: Jordbävningen den 1 november 1755 i epicentrum och i

svensk periferi (The Lisbon tsunami: the earthquake of 1 November 1755 as seen from its epicentre and from a Swedish periphery). Stockholm: Atlantis.

Buck-Morss S (2004) Visual studies and global imagination. Papers of Surrealism 2: 1–29.Carlsson B (1910) Nöjesafdelningen (The amusement ground). In: Bendix C and Folcker E (eds)

Allmänna svenska utställningen för konsthandtverk och konstindustri i Stockholm 1909 (The General Swedish Exhibition of Arts and Crafts in Stockholm 1909). Stockholm.

Cartwright L (2008) Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Chouliaraki L (2006) The Spectatorship of Suffering. London: Sage.Chouliaraki L (2008) The media as moral education: mediation and action. Media, Culture & Society

30(6): 831–852.Comment B (1999) The Panorama. London: Reaktion Books.Ekström A (2008) ‘Showing at one view’: Ferdinand Boberg’s ‘statistical machinery’ and the

visionary pedagogy of early twentieth-century statistical display. Early Popular Visual Culture 6(1): 35–49.

Ekström A (2009) Seeing from above: a particular history of the general observer. Nineteenth-Century Contexts 31(3): 185–207.

Ekström A (2010) Viljan att synas, viljan att se: Medieumgänge och publik kultur kring 1900 (The will to be seen, the will to see: media sociality and public culture around 1900). Stockholm: Stockholmia Förlag.

Ekström A (2011) Knowing audiences, knowing media: performing publics at the early twentieth-century fun fair. In: Ekström A, Jülich S, Lundgren F and Wisselgren P (eds) History of Participatory Media: Politics and Publics, 1750–2000. New York: Routledge.

Ekström A, Jülich S, Lundgren F and Wisselgren P (eds) (2011) History of Participatory Media: Politics and Publics, 1750–2000. New York: Routledge.

Godbey E (2006) Disaster tourism and the melodrama of authenticity: revisiting the 1889 Johnstown flood. Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 73(3): 273–315.

Gunning T (1994) The world as object lesson: cinema audiences, visual culture and the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904. Film History 6: 422–444.

Immerso M (2002) Coney Island: The People’s Playground. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Janku A, Schenk G and Mauelshagen F (eds) (2011) Historical Disasters in Context: Science,

Religion, and Politics. New York: Routledge.



Ekström 487

Kasson J (1978) Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century. New York: Hill and Wang.

Kerner A (2007) Representing the Catastrophic: Coming to Terms with Unimaginable Suffering and Incomprehensible Horror in Visual Culture. New York: Edwin Mellen Press.

Kessler F and Verhoeff N (eds) (2007) Networks of Entertainment: Early Film Distribution 1895–1915. Eastleigh: John Libbey.

Kracauer S (1995 [1963]) Photography. In: The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans., ed. and with an introduction by Levin TY. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Latour B (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.

Leikam S (2009) Depicting ‘natural’ disasters in U.S.-American history and culture: San Francisco’s City Hall as an icon of the 1906 earthquake and fire. Copas 10: 1–18.

Lennon J and Foley M (2000) Dark Tourism. London: Continuum.Nye D (1994) American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Nyheterna från Konstindustri-utställningen (News from the Arts and Crafts Exhibition) (1909a)

[news item], 21 June.Nyheterna från Konstindustri-utställningen (News from the Arts and Crafts Exhibition) (1909b)

På Johnstown (At the Johnstown show), 6 September.Oettermann S (1997) The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium. New York: Zone Books.Popple S (2002) ‘But the khaki-coloured camera is the latest thing’: the Boer War and visual culture

in Britain. In: Higson A (ed.) British Silent Cinema: Young and Innocent? Exeter: Exeter University Press.

Popple S (2005) ‘Startling, realistic, pathetic’: the Mitchell and Kenyon ‘Boer War’ films. In: Toulmin V, Popple S and Russell P (eds) The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film. London: British Film Institute.

Rojecki A (2009) Political culture and disaster response: the Great Floods of 1927 and 2005. Media, Culture & Society 31(6): 957–976.

Sally L (2006) Fighting the Flames: Fire-based Disaster Spectacles at Turn-of-the-century Coney Island. New York: Routledge.

Sandberg M (2003) Living Pictures, Missing Persons: Mannequins, Museums, and Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Sandberg M (2011) The interactivity of the model home. In: Ekström A, Jülich S, Lundgren F and Wisselgren P (eds) History of Participatory Media: Politics and Publics, 1750–2000. New York: Routledge.

Schwartz V (1998) Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sharpley R and Stone P (eds) (2009) The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism. Tonawanda: Channel View Publications.

Singer B (2001) Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press.

Snow R (1984) Coney Island: A Postcard Journey to the City of Fire. New York: Brightwaters Press.Stewart S (1993) On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Stock A and Stott C (eds) (2007) Representing the Unimaginable: Narratives of Disaster. New York:

Peter Lang.Stulman Dennett A and Warnke N (1990) Disaster spectacles at the turn of the century. Film History

4(2): 101–111.Sturken M (2007) Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to

Ground Zero. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Voltaire (2005 [1759]) Candide, or, Optimism, trans. Raffel B. New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press.



Documents

Exhibiting disasters: Mediation, historicity and spectatorship