Buttermilk Creek, Ithaca, N.Y. 2d Fall, 87 feet high 1860 - 1865

J.C. Burritt captured Buttermilk Creek in Ithaca, New York, in this stereoscopic card. Stereoscopic images like this one were wildly popular in the 19th century. Photography as a medium offered new ways of seeing and understanding space and our relationship to it. But who was afforded the opportunity to do the seeing, and whose relationship to space was prioritized? Landscape photography in the United States also needs to be understood within the context of westward expansion, and the colonial project. These images contributed to the idea of the American landscape as sublime, untouched, and ripe for the taking. However, this narrative obscures the violent displacement of indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands. How might we rethink our relationship to these images, keeping in mind the complex history of the land they depict? What does it mean to look at a waterfall and acknowledge both its beauty, and the history of dispossession and erasure?