In 1838, a year before the announcement of the first successful photographic processes, English inventor Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802–1875) built a viewing device designed to produce a three-dimensional image from two drawings of the same object. For Wheatstone’s invention, one drawing was created from the perspective of the right eye, and the other from the left. With the aid of mirrors, the two drawings were superimposed, causing the viewer’s brain to perceive the illusion of a three-dimensional object.
In 1849, Scottish scientist David Brewster (1781–1868) replaced Wheatstone’s mirrors with lenses, creating a much smaller and more convenient viewing apparatus. French optician Jean Duboscq (1817–1886) improved Brewster’s innovations during the following decade, and produced stereoscopic Daguerreotypes for an eager European audience. In 1861, American physician and author Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) introduced the “Holmes Viewer,” a simple and affordable mask-like stereoscope featuring a folding wooden handle, and variations were a common sight in homes across Europe and America until the 1930s.
According to William Darrah, “by 1860, every country in the world touched by Western culture had its own stereo photographers.”1 The “stereograph,” as it came to be known, refers to pairs of photographs mounted on a card that measures about three-and-a-half inches tall and seven inches long. Like Wheatstone’s drawings, the photographs mounted on the cards are taken from slightly different angles to mimic the perspective of binocular vision. When viewed through the lenses of a stereoscope, the two photographs merge, giving a viewer a startling perception of three-dimensionality. Holmes described this experience in 1859:
The first effect of looking at a good photograph thorough the stereoscope is a surprise such as no painting ever produced. The mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture. The scraggy branches of a tree in the foreground run out at us as if they would scratch our eyes out. The elbow of a figure stands forth so as to make us almost uncomfortable. Then there is such a frightful amount of detail, that we have the same sense of infinite complexity which Nature gives us.2
From the 1860s through the 1930s, viewing stereographs was an enormously popular pastime. Hundreds of publishing companies, including the London Stereoscopic Photographic Company, Edward and Ben Kilburn (known as the Kilburn Brothers and later as B.W. Kilburn), H. C. White, and Underwood & Underwood, sprang up to create and distribute stereographs. The millions of stereographs these companies produced feature every type of subject matter imaginable, from the exotic to the mundane.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Underwood & Underwood was the foremost publisher of stereographs in the United States, “publishing twenty-five thousand stereographs a day and three hundred thousand stereoscopes a year.”3 The company was founded in 1882 by brothers Bert (1862–1943) and Elmer (1859–1947) Underwood, who bought up smaller stereoscopic companies, developed a comprehensive national sales strategy, and introduced innovations such as themed boxed sets of stereographs to avid collectors.
Like their competitors, Underwood & Underwood hired countless freelance and full-time photographers. Most were anonymous; mass production allowed no room for star photographers, only clever publishing executives and dapper salesmen who delighted an entire country with their wares.
The affordable Holmes Viewer allowed even families of limited means to own a stereoscope and travel the world from their armchairs. Stereoscopes were used as educational tools in classrooms and as vision-training devices in doctors’ offices. Holmes, a great believer in the educational potential of the stereoscope, speculated that eventually vast libraries of stereographs would be established, “where all men can find the special forms they particularly desire to see as artists, or as scholars, or as mechanics, or in any other capacity.”4
Holmes’ vision never came to pass, possibly because the stereoscope was, in reality, less of a tool for the advancement of knowledge than a means of popular entertainment. Stereographs of famous and far-flung locations around the world served as virtual tourism of the most general type, and hand-colored stereographs of children or flowers were in high demand.
No matter how commonplace the subject matter, however, viewing a historical stereograph is a mesmerizing experience. Holmes’ description of surprise and shock still applies, and is doubled by a sensation of looking into the past—a past with shape, form, and dimensionality. The illusion is complete and yet somehow disturbing: unlike a view seen by our eyes, scenes photographed in stereo are in perfect focus from foreground to background. The perception of flat planes receding into space lends stereographs a dream-like aura of time stopped and reality altered, almost as if one is peering into the window of a perfectly lit miniature world.
Stereographs elicit in their viewers the intense desire to look, to take in every bit of the “frightful amount of detail”5 described by Holmes. This desire merges with macabre curiosity when one gazes at One of China’s Most Terrible Death Punishments—Shanghai, an unusual stereograph that depicts a man in a wooden cage in which condemned prisoners slowly died of exposure and starvation.
In this image, published by Underwood & Underwood around the turn of the twentieth century, the caged man is presented in sharp relief against the crowd behind him. His head emerges from the top of the cage, his expression unreadable. Though this image, whose American audience would read it through a colonialist lens, is at least partially staged, it is possible that the imprisoned man was left in the cage to die, some days or weeks after the
stereograph was taken. We will never know the man’s fate, but, through the lenses of the stereoscope and from the safety of our armchairs, we can join the crowd on the street in Shanghai and bear witness to his suffering.
Rosalind Shipley
Underwood & Underwood, (James Ricalton) 1221, One of China’s most terrible death punishments—Shanghai, c.1900, stereograph, (2) 8.3 x 7.6 cm, SOLARI 94.024.006L