part of the jonathan ross collection
Stereoviews
The International Exhibition of 1862
No 53 - The Nave, from the Western Dome
The London Stereoscopic Company obtained a license to photograph this exhibition, a sequel to the Great Exhibition of 1851, and produced a series of 350 numbered views under the supervision of William England, assisted by William Russell Sedgfield, amongst others. It is estimated that, including all the variants, there might exist over one thousand views of the exhibition.
I have mainly selected views including people, as having a more general appeal, for there are lots of images that might only interest specialists in porcelain, statuary or engineering, for example. We all enjoy looking at people and to see the Victorian gentlemen in their top hats and the ladies in their crinolines is a pleasure in itself, while their presence adds a human dimension to these vast halls filled with innumerable treasures (or what might be considered an enormous jumble sale).
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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