![]() However, the stereoscope soon proved an apt vehicle for staged studio scenes. Source : 3D strove on views of lands and people around the world, yet turned out to bring very little to the studio portrait, whose stereo treatment remained largely reserved to personalities, artistic nudes, and pornographic pictures. These stereographic dual sequences made magic-lantern tricks portable and brought them unprecedented realism. The simple before-and-after continuum created generates an implicit story, elementary as it might be, just like those found in the few lithographies à système (flip prints) published in the French satirical weekly La Caricature in the early 1830s (see figs. In its utmost simplicity, the backlighting effect enhances the views with more than just aesthetic value: the apparition turns them into micro-narratives. In backlit mode, some tissue views reveal a train passing through a lonely country station or a warship exploding at sea. Some artists went further in proposing more than just an alternate atmosphere for the same location: they simulated action by representing dynamic objects. That’s where photographic storytelling begins. ![]() Source: ‘ Stereo Views,’ Scientific Curiosities, Thomas Charles Sanberg.Ī few dashes of watercolor on the back of the thin paper slide reveal hidden shapes and colors when held up to the light eerie skeletons’ eyes turn red, carriages or balloons suddenly appear in previously empty photographic sceneries. “Surprise’ Tissue View, Locomotive at station,” recto & verso, n.d. For a night vista, backlighting darkens the sky and illuminates famous monuments or picturesque chalets. The so-called ‘French tissue’ view was a stereoscopic paper slide that recycled transparency tricks of the peep show and Daguerre & Bouton’s 1820s diorama theater. It got much mileage out of the very low-tech effect obtained by piercing small holes through the paper to let light through in selected areas of the image. Around 1900, such sets became a staple in modern US school libraries-high-tech image/word reference tools detailing the modern world with unprecedented precision at a time when printing technology did not yet afford high photographic reproduction quality in books and periodicals.īack in the 1860s, amidst a profusion of stereoviews showcasing international landscapes, monuments, and street scenes (once exposure time permitted to feature moving subjects), stereoscopic photography also made the step from single-image photographic narrative to more elaborate fiction, the same way magic lantern tricks worked. This fine mid-1870s stereo view, for instance, belongs to a series by Frank Robbins detailing Pennsylvania’s early oil industry. It is doubly panoramic in that it belongs to an educational overview in 116 images and features a rarity on the back of the card: a drawing that supplements the explanatory text with a panoptic rendition of the well’s depth (you can see it there). After the 1870s, stereoviews nearly always bore a caption, and, in the case of the largest documentary sets, an educational text of up to 250-300 words on the back of the card and/or companion booklets and maps. Stereo views lend themselves particularly well to rendering sets with defined foreground and background planes. Nineteenth-century stereoscopic photography is panoramic because stereo photographers often published their images as documentary sets (tour of a city or a country, geographical and ethnological surveys, etc.) of a dozen or hundreds views. These 3D photographs consisted of paired images shot from slightly different angles, on metal or glass plates or, most commonly, paper glued to a cardboard support. Some historians call them the first modern mass media. For the rest of the century, stereoscopic views became the leading form of mass-produced photography, sold not only in photographers’ and opticians’ shops but also in drugstores, mirrors and frame shops, accessories, gift, and “fancy goods” stores. To generations of armchair travelers, stereoscopic photography offered a high-tech window onto the world, as well as an early form of cinema-all with unprecedented realism. ![]() Both born in the 1830s like the comic strip, photography and the stereoscope-an optical device to view 3D drawings-teamed up by the 1850s to produce the nineteenth century’s most panoramic and sequential form of photography.
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