part of the jonathan ross collection
Stereoviews
Wood Engravings and Lithographs
Wood Engravings
The first stereoscopic images to be mass-produced in the 19th century took the form of wood engravings and lithographs. The optician Louis-Jules Duboscq commissioned a set of stereo engravings of simple geometric designs for viewing in the stereoscopes he had started to sell in his shop in the early 1950s.
To provide his customers with an inexpensive alternative to daguerreotypes, which involved a labour intensive one-off process, Duboscq also issued a series of stereoscopic lithographs deriving from existing daguerreotype images, and stereo lithographs were produced in a variety of different styles by unidentified artists some of which are illustrated here.
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.
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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