Victorian Visual Culture

On September 27, 2025, I went to the Big E with my parents, sister, and two of my younger cousins. The Big E is a massive event held for 17 days every year in West Springfield by the Eastern States Exposition (ESE), first held in 1917. It has the traditional fairground elements, such as fried food, rollercoasters, and small games where you can win prizes. However, it also has unique elements such as “The Avenue of States”, a line of buildings with each one representing a New England state, selling signature foods and trinkets within. One event that has struck the attention of my siblings and I ever since we started going is the pig race. Twice a day, three or four miniature pigs at a time are set loose on a small track and challenged to see who can run the fastest to the end. Stands are constructed around the track, and they quickly become overflowing when the race is about to start. There’s music, an announcer, screams from rollercoasters in the distance, which all get drowned out by the roar of the crowd when the pigs set off and one wins only seconds later.

With Victorian Visual Culture in mind, I am lead down two paths of thought. For one, the Big E is a humane, ethical venture that aims to promote local businesses, artists, and farms, and the ESE is a non-profit. On its own, the event caters to every one of the senses, with bright, flashy colors, rich foods, and more. However, I can’t help but think of other, more disturbing media that depict a chase after sensationalism, new technologies, and shock value–particularly regarding animals–and disregarding ethics. For example, the film “Poor Things” (dir. Lanthimos, 2023), which proposes a Frankenstein-like scientist that combines different animals and human beings together. The film examines the detrimental effects of a man playing at God, the development of biology and technology, and what conformity (and nonconformity) looks like in Victorian England. It additionally questions how to make sense of your own identity while being forcibly defined by other peoples’ perceptions of you manifold, a question that is very relevant to interrogating the popularization and spread of photographs.

The second path of thought that struck me was how technology both expands and interrupts “real life”. When I went to see the miniature pig race at the Big E, my family arrived late so we had to stand at the back of the crowd. We couldn’t actually see the pigs from our position, but several people were filming with phones or cameras, so even though I was only a few feet away from the track I ended up watching through someone’s phone they were using to record. His phone provided a workaround and made the event accessible to me, albeit in a strange way, but it felt truly bizarre. I was right there – and yet it was like I wasn’t watching the race in person. It both brought me closer to and abstracted reality.