Page 103 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 103/146
The importance of the stereo-photograph is that it was still widely in use in the 20th century - in fact you can still buy a variety of 3d/stereo cameras in 2020 (see Fujifilm, Nishika etc). For example the bulk of Jacques Henri Lartigue’s early 20th century images were originally created in stereo. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Viewmaster used a proprietary format for their Viewmaster 3d film cartidges:
William Gruber and Harold Graves: Viewmaster Stereo 3d Viewer 1939.
This was the first modernisation of the stereograph viewer - a viewer for looking at matched stereo- pairs of photographs - since Oliver Wendell Holmes’ Stereoscopic viewers of the 19th Century. Willi- am Gruber’s great improvement was to supply pre-packaged cardboard disks (called ‘reels’) of color slides (shot onto the new Kodachrome stock - with 7 stills per disk), so that viewers had a whole ‘programme’ of stills to watch. Later in the 1950s, Viewmaster slide reels came in packets of 3 them- atically connected reels. And they weren’t all travelogues or condensed versions of 3D B movies, Gruber produced several educational sets, including his famous Atlas of Human Anatomy - specially shot 3d images of parts of the human body. Of course, many attempts at creating 3d images have been made since the invention of photography in the 1830s and 1840s, but none had been comer- cially packaged in an easy to use one-piece plastic viewer before...This invention came from the con- flation of Kodachrome colour-slide film and Gruber’s realisation that the stereo-optical illusions of the stereo viewers of the 19th century could be replicated and cheaply mass produced in colourful plastics (coloured Bakelite - and later injection-moulded polyethylene) rather than the hand-made ex- pensive mahogany and brass of the earlier stereo viewers. These View Master’s are still an interest- ing novelty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View-Master
In terms of stereographs in the service of the modernist project - in the mid 1950s, the design- er/polymaths Charles and Ray Eames produced their book featuring 3d red/green stereoscop- ic images as Viewmaster disks (Stereo Photographs - including historic images of the Eames House 1955) - adopting new imaging technology (3d movies were just appearing from Holly- wood, in an attempt to balance the growing popularity of Television) to catalogue their recent
product-design work.
http://www.3dstereo.com/viewmaster/vp-eam.html