Exalted bodies, Charles Ellis Johnson and the practice of Mormon photography
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- On September 24, 1890, the then president, prophet, seer, and revelator of the Mormon Church, Wilford Woodruff, made an announcement. "I have arived [sic], " he declared, "at a point in the History of my life as the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints whare [sic] I am under the necessity of acting for the Temporal salvation of the Church." Finally succumbing to almost four decades of the larger nation's anti-polygamy assault, Woodruff sought to save his religion by relinquishing plural marriage. In so doing, however, he profoundly altered the very nature of Mormonism itself. Because in renouncing the practice of polygamy, the LDS church did not simply disavow an unorthodox family structure. To the contrary, it abandoned perhaps the central doctrine of its founding theology -- a theology rooted in an intoxicating vision of the male body and that body's sexualized capacity to do nothing less than make heaven on earth. This dissertation examines both this vision and its loss through the work of the little-known Mormon artist Charles Ellis Johnson (1857-1926). Church photographer, Holy Land traveler, and, perhaps surprisingly, erotic stereographer, Johnson made pictures that both restage Mormonism's original, polygamous dreams and reveal the extent to which the country shattered these dreams when they broke the LDS to monogamy. More than this, Johnson's images simultaneously disclose how the nation's brutal anti-polygamy war rooted itself in not simply terror and revulsion but also a delicious myth of the manly Saint. Focusing on Johnson's Holy Land work and his erotic stereographs, I examine the way in which Mormon polygamy spoke to such collective fantasies of manhood, power, and, ultimately, the creative impulse itself; I examine, in other words, the way in which plural marriage never existed as an isolated religious event but rather belonged to an historical, cultural, and social vista that encompassed phenomena as diverse as minstrelsy, the New Woman, dude ranches, and even Emerson.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2010 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Campbell, Mary Katherine |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Art and Art History |
| Primary advisor | Wolf, Bryan Jay |
| Thesis advisor | Wolf, Bryan Jay |
| Thesis advisor | Corn, Wanda M |
| Thesis advisor | Gough, Maria |
| Thesis advisor | Ma, Jean, 1972- |
| Advisor | Corn, Wanda M |
| Advisor | Gough, Maria |
| Advisor | Ma, Jean, 1972- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Mary Katherine Campbell. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Art and Art History. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2010. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2010 by Mary Katherine Campbell
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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