99. Native Cane Grinders in Sunny Florida,

ca. 1890

<p>Commercially produced photographs like this one exemplify Northern whites’ demand for images of Southern Black life in the period following the Civil War. Inexpensive and popular, they catered to a variety of interests by depicting a range of subjects and genres, especially images of agricultural labor and scenes from domestic life. This image shows Black laborers working in the post-Emancipation American South, where slavery was illegal but working conditions were often harsh—and where Black Americans could still be economically exploited. Rather than showing grueling labor, however, this photograph pictures a moment of staged repose, as Black workers enjoy the sugar cane that they harvested. This visual trope was common in late nineteenth-century photographs that sought to promote Southern and Caribbean plantations as tourist destinations.</p><p>This photograph is a stereograph, a format that places two images taken at slightly different angles side by side on a single card. When viewed through a binocular device called a stereoscope, the two images coalesce into one, producing an illusion of three-dimensionality. The composition of this photograph was carefully arranged to enhance the effect of depth: the laborers are arranged in a pyramidal structure before large barrels placed outside a barn, creating layers of pictorial planes that would pop forward toward a viewer when seen through a stereoscope. This stereoscopic view presents the same image as “Native Cane Grinders”(<a href="https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/129735">2017-40</a&…;), a black-and-white version. The bright colors here reinforce the sense of labor on sugar plantations as a bright and jaunty spectacle worthy of a trip to see in person.</p>