Abstract

In 1906, the iconic mail order firm Sears, Roebuck and Company produced and sold a set of stereographic images of the company's recently completed Chicago plant. Claiming to offer viewers a transparent and reassuring look into the inner workings of its business, Sears took advantage of popular conceptions about the truthfulness of stereoscopy and the popularity of the medium as an entertainment to disseminate a highly edited and rhetorical view of the company. Sears intended the stereographs to create a favorable impression of the company in the minds of consumers and was part of its strategy to build a "personal" relationship with each of its customers. However, viewers could and did bring their own knowledge and experiences to the objects, constructing their own readings.

This paper examines the ways in which the images and texts of these stereographs worked together in order to create multiple narratives about Sears. These narratives reveal not only the image that Sears wanted to present to consumers, but also the attitudes of consumers toward Sears. Attempting to understand why these stereographs were made, why early 20^th century viewers found them interesting, and how those viewers read these images, opens a window on many of the issues of the period: the growth of visual culture and visual literacy, the changing relationships between producers and consumers, the ways in which people understood their new position in a national consumer economy, and the continued circulation of shared cultural experience, such as the 1893 Columbian Exposition, in multiple media.