part of the jonathan ross collection
Stereoviews
Samuel Poulton
Untitled, Young Lady reading
Explore the work of Samuel Poulton with the following link which takes you to a series of images and notes about each stereoview. This opens in a new tab or window.
A comfortable size for freeviewing (parallel viewing) the images in the linked pdf documents is 125% or 150%. This can be adjusted at the top right of the document.
Early Group scenes of Victorian family life (several from the LSC Third Series of 1856) and many untitled studio scenes with well-dressed young ladies.
Stereoviews replicate the way we see the world by taking two views of a scene, one from the right eye position and another from the left. When these are mounted together and viewed in a stereoscope, the brain merges them into a 3-dimensional or ‘stereoscopic’ image.
The technique emerged in the 1850s, soon after the invention of photography, through the work of Charles Wheatstone and Sir David Brewster, and developed into a worldwide craze with thousands of practitioners.
Stereo photography has gone out of fashion several times over the past couple of centuries, only to be rediscovered by later generations. Most of the images on this site are by European photographers working in the 1850s and 60s.