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The Geographical Review October 1998, Vol. 88 (4), pp. 548-570 THE PHOTOGRAPHIC CONSTRUCTION OF TOURIST SPACE IN VICTORIAN AMERICA STEVEN HOELSCHER ABSTRACT: Tensions and contradictions surround photographic representations of landscape--and the practices that created those representations--during the medium's so-called Golden Age in the late nineteenth century. These are examined by focusing on the landscape views of H. H. Bennett, a photographer of considerable renown whose stereographs and oversized panoramas of the Wisconsin Dells transformed a working river into a picturesque landscape. Such a construction of genteel tourist space in Victorian America suggests a post-frontier aesthetic in which nature is valued less as an opportunity for progress or an occasion for terror than as pleasing scenery. Keywords: H. H. Bennett, landscape, photography, tourism, Wisconsin Dells DR. HOELSCHER is an assistant professor of geography at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70803.