A book about the sexualized photographs and stereoscopic images produced by Mormon Church photographer Charles Ellis Johnson (1857-1926). Using Johnson’s photographs and other artifacts of
Mormon visual culture, it revises the history of the Mormon Church’s legal and cultural battles about polygamy, a doctrine that was disavowed on September 24, 1890, in order to assure the
LDS’s survival in America. But in renouncing polygamy Mormon authorities did not simply disavow an unorthodox family structure. To the contrary, they abandoned perhaps the central doctrine of
their church’s founding theology--a theology that rooted itself in an intoxicating vision of the male body and that body’s sexualized capacity to do nothing less than make heaven on earth.
Focusing on Johnson’s erotic stereographs (mainly of women) as well as his studio portraits, Campbell explores the complicated way in which LDS polygamy activated such collective myths of
manhood, power, and, ultimately, the creative impulse itself for Mormons.
