Historical notes about Stereo Photography
Shortly after the invention of the camera, photographers started producing and
marketing stereo prints and cards.
These have been viewed and enjoyed in homes from the
middle of the 19th century. These have included extensive battle scene photography
during the civil war and parlor stereo scope sets made popular in the late 1800s.
The cameras used for these involved large format film and the cards were essentially
contact prints. 
Companies such as Keystone Views produced millions of cards with tens of thousands of
titles many which can still be found at reasonable prices at antique stores and flea
markets today. This early phase of stereo photography lasted until the 1930s.
In the 1950s stereo photography enjoyed a mini revival due to the introduction of the
Stereo Realist camera by the David White Company. This time the media of choice was
slides not prints and the results were seen through illuminated viewers or through
projection, not Holmes stereoscopes. Again the popularity of stereo photography
started to recede in the early 1960s with only the View-Master as a reminder of the
popularity of that era.
Berezin Stereo
Photography Products supports people interested in both these era's of stereo
photography. For collectors of the older stereo cards we have inexpensive Lorgnette viewers for viewing the cards without an expensive
stereoscope, reproduction stereo cards from the last
century, and the book, Civil War in Depth.
This is the first book to present the greatest photographs of the Civil War in the
three-dimensional format in which they were originally taken and meant to be seen.
We also have four View-Master books (books with
View-Master Reels) that cover the history of stereo photography from its infancy until
now. These include:
 | 3-D Past and Present is an excellent full-color work
that covers a lot of 3-D ground. Its many topics include 3-D basics, some history of 3-D
and stereo cameras, uses of 3-D, holography, and a large section on the history and
development of View-Master 3-D. |
| 3D Imagics- A Stereoscopic Guide to the 3-D Past and
its Magic Images, This is one of the finest works on the history of 3-D and the images
created by past photographers. Wim van Keulen discusses in detail the processes developed
to create and print 3-D cards as well as the many devices used to view them during the
"Golden Age of 3-D", from 1838 to 1900. |
| View-Master Viewers - An
Illustrated History 1939-1994: At the 1939 New York World's Fair, the first
View-Master 3-D Viewer was introduced. Since that time it has brought continuous enjoyment
to young and old alike. This work is a historical overview of View-Master equipment since
its introduction. Six View-Master Reels (42 3-D pictures) show the many different viewers
manufactured over the years, and also several unusual and rare 3-D viewers, some of which
are one-of-a-kind examples. |
| Begun in 1948 by one of the pioneers of View-Master and not completed until 1962, the
original "Stereoscopic Atlas of
Human Anatomy" consisted of 221 View-Master Reels with 1,547 color stereo views of
dissections of every body region. This, the new "Stereoscopic Atlas of Human Anatomy" contains 83 of
the original stereo views on 12 View-Master Reels and the labeled drawings that accompany
them. The text and stereo image selection for this new book was done by Robert A. Chase,
M.D., of the Anatomy Department of Stanford University (where Bassett and Gruber did all
their work). |
