part of the jonathan ross collection

Stereoviews

Victorian Cats

A Victorian Cat

Explore examples from the ‘Cat’ collection using the following link which takes you to a series of images and notes about each stereoview. These open 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.

Cats may rule the internet, but the love affair between photographers and their feline friends is nothing new.

Here are a few stereoviews of Victorian cats from the 1850s – 70s.

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.

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