Together with the magic- lantern craze of the 18th and 19th centuries, the rise of this branch of three-dimensional photography in the 1850s was the most important development in visual mass culture before the coming of the cinema. Initial research on practical stereoscopy was done by Charles Wheatstone (1802-75) and published by him, with an illustration of a reflecting stereoscope for viewing simple drawings, in 1838. After the announcement of Daguerre's and Talbot's photographic processes in 1839, Wheatstone commissioned Antoine Claudet, Richard Beard, and Henry Collen to make stereo daguerreotypes and calotypes. Later research by Sir David Brewster resulted in the creation of a lenticular stereoscope suitable for viewing daguerreotypes in 1849. A luxury version made by the Paris optician Louis-Jules Duboscq, with a set of stereo daguerreotypes, was presented to Queen Victoria after she had admired the invention at the Great Exhibition in 1851.
This precipitated a craze for the medium, almost immediately boosted by the rise of the wet-plate process. Early suppliers in London included Negretti & Zambra, who began with a series on the exhibition itself. Claudet, who remained loyal to the daguerreotype, sent a set of exhibition stereos to the tsar of Russia in 1852, and subsequently improved Brewster's stereoscope. In 1854 George Swan Nottage founded the London Stereoscopic Company (LSC), with the slogan ‘No Home without a Stereoscope’; within two years it had sold half a million viewers, and by 1858 had 100, 000 subjects in stock. There was a similar boom, after initial patent wars, in Paris, where Duboscq and Claude-Marie Ferrier led the field, and viewers were even installed at the annual Salon, where in 1859 Charles Baudelaire noted ‘thousands of avid eyes’ peering ‘into the holes of the stereoscope, which were like skylights into infinity’. Important in the USA were the Langenheim brothers, Southworth & Hawes (who invented an elaborate ‘grand parlor stereoscope’ for viewing whole-plate daguerreotypes in their Boston showroom), and E. & H. T. Anthony, which adopted the typical practice of both commissioning pictures and publishing foreign imports. Important in promoting stereoscopy in America was Oliver Wendell Holmes who, after initial scepticism, hailed it as a valuable educational and democratic medium and called for the creation of stereo libraries. He also coined the term ‘stereograph’, and designed a successful hand-held viewer for stereocards, manufactured by Joseph Bates from 1861.
The earliest stereoscopic image pairs were taken in quick succession by moving the plate, the lens, or the whole camera a precisely calculated distance between exposures, and various refinements of this system were introduced during the 19th century. In 1854, however, Achille Quinet patented the first ‘binocular’ (twin-lens) camera, the Quinetoscope, and in 1856 the Manchester inventor J.B. Dancer launched an improved version of his own binocular design, usable with either wet or dry plates. This succeeded commercially, and the twin-lens principle subsequently dominated stereo camera development.
The range of stereo images produced was enormous. Landscapes and architectural studies, including thousands of views of the Crystal Palace, predominated at first and remained popular, with new scenes added from throughout the world. But they were soon supplemented by a huge variety of staged images (usually with live subjects, but sometimes figurines or cut-outs), from costumed period pieces, play scenes, and re-creations of celebrated paintings like Henry Wallis's Death of Chatterton or W. P. Frith's Derby Day, to genre series like the LSC's Happy Homes of England, ‘sentimentals’ with titles like Broken Vows and In the Bitter Cold, and humorous scenes. Another important staged genre was erotic, ranging from suggestive series like La Vie de Bohème to downright pornography. Many of these images were hand coloured; others, mostly produced in France from the 1860s, were ‘tissues’—photographs printed on thin paper coloured on the back and designed to be viewed against the light. The high point of stereoscopy's ‘first age’ was probably the year 1858, when the astronomer Charles Piazzi Smyth published the first stereo-illustrated book, Teneriffe: An Astronomer's Experiment, Warren de la Rue (1815-89) made stereographs of the moon, and Mayer & Pierson took a stereo portrait of Napoleon III on his 50th birthday. Stereographs of the American West were also on sale by this time, and the great American survey photographers, Hillers, Jackson, O'Sullivan, Watkins, and Weed, made them in their thousands through the 1860s and 1870s. In 1869, finally, the British War Office published a set of 36 stereocards taken by the Royal Engineers during survey work in Sinai.
The mid-1860s saw the launch of the multiple-viewing apparatus eventually known as the Kaiserpanorama. In 1880 one of the leading names of the ‘second age’ of commercial stereoscopy, Underwood & Underwood, was founded, and continued to publish series on a wide range of topical, educational, and religious subjects until 1921. However, the fashion had declined during the 1860s, perhaps partly because of the newer carte de visite craze, and in the 1870s and 1880s the registration of stereoscopy-related patents in France plummeted. But interest revived in the 1890s, especially on the part of amateurs. The Stereoscopic Society was founded in England in 1893, and the Stéréo-Club Français in 1903; and photo enthusiasts like the young Jacques-Henri Lartigue naturally added stereoscopy to their repertoires, sometimes combining it with the autochrome process. However, Ducos Du Hauron had patented a method for making colour stereo images in 1897, and other innovations ranged from the ingenious Taxiphote viewer to the stereo postcard. There were also new cameras from French, German, and American manufacturers, competing in terms of portability, versatility (plates and roll-film, sometimes also a panoramic facility), and user-friendliness. Particularly successful was the Richard Verascope, launched in 1893, which in its numerous versions remained a favourite of wealthy amateurs until well after the Second World War. New arrivals in the 1920s included Franke & Heidecke's Heidoscop (1921) and Rolleidoscop (1926), triple-lens cameras with waist-level viewfinders that in certain respects anticipated the Rolleiflex (1928), and devices like Leitz's prismatic Stereoly that enabled conventional cameras to take stereoscopic pictures.
In the 1930s, judging by the equipment available, stereo photography remained popular among a minority of keen amateurs. In the meantime, two other long-heralded forms of three-dimensional imaging, the anaglyph and the lenticular screen system, seemed to be coming of age, and to a degree overshadowed the classic stereograph. The French photographer Léon Gimpel (1878-1948) published a sensational anaglyphic picture of the moon in L' Illustration in 1924, and the technique found applications in advertising and other fields into the 1930s. The technically more daunting lenticular stereogram was espoused by Maurice Bonnet (1907-94), who founded the Relièphographie company in 1937, and in the Second World War ran a 3-D portrait studio in the Champs-Élysées.
After 1945, new stereoscopic cameras were launched in both the USA and the USSR, while late versions of classics like the Verascope remained available. Commercial stereographs continued to be marketed to tourists until at least the 1970s, for use with simple plastic viewers like the Romo, made by the French firm La Stéréochromie. There was yet another stereoscopic revival in the 1990s, associated, at one extreme, with fun snapshots from the 35 mm Loreo camera (1995) made in Hong Kong, and at the other with the work of contemporary fine artists such as Síocháin Hughes (b. 1961), Martha Laugs (b. 1935), and Bruce McKaig (b. 1959). An exhibition at the Musée Carnavalet, Paris, in 2000, Paris en 3D, reviewed the whole history of the medium in one of its major centres.
Stereocards, late 19th century
— Robin Lenman
Bibliography
- Jones, J., Wonders of the Stereoscope (1976).
- Darrah, W. C., The World of Stereographs (1977).
- Coe, B., Cameras: From Daguerreotypes to Instant Pictures (1978).
- Pellerin, D., La photographie stéréoscopique sous le Second Empire (1995).
- Reynaud, F., Tambrun, C., and Timby, K. (eds.), Paris in 3D: From Stereoscopy to Virtual Reality (2000)
