ABSTRACT
95Popular images of people and places, usually in the form of cheap print, existed well before industrialization. This chapter focuses on the development of popular visual media that are relevant to stereotypical thinking and visual clichés. It reconstructs when and how technology, epistemology, and politics - reproducible images, objectivity claims, and national discourse - amalgamate into these all too familiar clichés. To this end, this chapter considers mass production and popularity of images, aesthetic principles imposed by available technologies, the negotiation of claims to truth, and realism attributed to the images. Perspective prints and catchpenny prints are discussed in detail. The change of classificatory categories in the description of images of people and places results in new insights about the moment when national categories gained importance in the description of people and places.
