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The World of Stereographs
Art Journal, Fall, 1998 by Melody D. Davis
1977. Reprint, Nashville: Land Yacht Press, 1997. 246 pp., 301 b/w ills. $21.95 paper.
The late twentieth-century conception of the history of photography differs radically in many aspects from the actual photographic media and their contexts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So different is today's construct that it comes as a shock to realize how much of the history and importance of stereography has been suppressed - a reaction that may over time steadily increase to incredulity. It is indeed not uncommon to actually have to explain to other scholars in the field just what a stereograph is: two nearly identical images, generally photographs, exposed as a rule simultaneously and from a distance separation of approximately two-and-one-half inches, mounted on a card and viewed through a viewer or "free viewed" to produce the simulation of three dimensions. Had the stereograph been a passing fad, novelty, or, quantitatively speaking, insignificant, such basic information would be expected as a matter of course.
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But this is far from the case. The stereograph was the dominant form of photography in the nineteenth century. Its immense popularity lasted approximately until the cinema and halftone-illustrated print media sent it into eclipse after World War I. For the years of historical stereography, it is less a question of which photographers issued stereographs than which ones did not. Most nineteenth-century photographers canonically enshrined in today's textbooks published stereographs. Many of the now-certified classics of photography's first one hundred years are half stereoviews. The first instantaneous photographs were stereographs, as well as the first flash photography.' It is probable that the grandparents of every reader of this review owned stereographs and a viewer. If not, they certainly looked at stereographs and came to them with expectations about the capability of photography to literally replicate the three-dimensional view - expectations that differ greatly from how we approach the image today.
So, why the obscurity? Why do we need to explain just what a stereograph is in the first place? The full history of stereography's exclusion from the canon, its appropriation by the cult of the single image (accomplished by the publication of half-views), and the suppression of its history, influence, popularity, and the wealth of cultural information surrounding it has much to do - as does everything in the history of photography - with ideology and the promulgation of certain assumptions regarding talent and the fine art print. Stereography did not fit the photo-as-art crusade for a great many reasons. I won't explain them at length here, but suffice it to say that the double nature of the image pair itself created a fundamental problem when it came to the individual expression of genius metaphorically represented by the single master print. Nor did the sometimes amazingly life-like replication of the view that stereographs could supply comfortably conform as signs for the transformation of the real into the self-evident handling/handwork of the artist. Also, if three dimensions are truly simulated, modernist perspectival flattening is left out of the tool kit. To top it all off, stereography was too popular and too democratic (read "pedestrian/plebeian"). Ubiquitous, it became a victim of its own success when halftone chromolithographs in stereo flooded the market at less than a penny a piece.
Art and photography historians of the last two decades have been actively reexamining the canon of photography history and the presumptions on which it rests. Yet, very little critical attention has been turned to the first visual mass media and the dominant photographic form of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nor has the interdisciplinary interest in theories of simulation sparked a reconsideration of the billions of views that physically simulated spatiality for people throughout the United States and Western Europe. Simulation of the view through stereography represented, more than anything, what the public - and a truly across-the-board democratic public at that - expected a photograph to be and mean. Its near erasure in terms of today's critical attention contributes to an ahistorical view.
Fortunately, William C. Darrah's The World of Stereographs, the most authoritative reference in stereography - long out of print - is once again available, thanks to a reprint edition issued by J. Richiuso of Land Yacht Press in Nashville. Richiuso, a former curator of history at the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences in New York, realized the need for greater access to this sometimes hard-to-find yet fundamental text. Darrah's essential book, which the author first self-published in 1977, has stood the test of time and now serves - even without annotation - as the first source for those researching or collecting stereographs.(2)
Its scholarship has remained unquestioned, largely because no one but the late Darrah has ever spent so much labor researching and collecting stereography to be able to deeply query the information. Darrah, who was a professor of biology at Gettysburg College, approached stereographs as historical documents, and his scientific background liberated him from meddling debates on artistry. His essentially taxonomic approach is a necessary one, given that so little basic research on the history of the medium is available. It is also, unfortunately, what limits the book. For cultural analysis one needs to look elsewhere.(3) In all fairness, however, Darrah had little concern for cultural theses, and what his work lacks in conclusions it more than compensates for in comprehensiveness. His work was in the topical spirit of the medium itself, and it is the first and only to offer exhaustive information on the medium, its producers, and its subjects.
