part of the jonathan ross collection

Stereoviews

Nudes

Stereo Realist Nudes

Stereoview by Harold Lloyd

The Stereo Realist was the most popular 35 mm stereo camera ever manufactured and started the era of popular stereo photography of the mid 20th century.

The silent film star Harold Lloyd was a devotee and even wrote the introduction to the 1954 Stereo Realist Handbook.

This section contains a number of Lloyd’s stereoviews from the 1950s along with other examples of nude photography from that era.

These images are from a totally different era to the rest of my collection, and some definitely qualify as kitsch, but the Great American Pin-up is very much a feature of its time and a subject I have enjoyed collecting.

Vistascreen

Miss Continentale

The Vistascreen Company was founded in 1956 and ran until 1961, during which time it produced over 300 sets of inexpensive paper stereoviews which could be viewed in folding plastic stereoscopes.

Most of the views were produced as tourist souvenirs or for armchair travellers to purchase mail order, but they also supplied sets of ‘Art Studies’ , ‘Glamour Models’ and ‘Miss Continentale’, for ‘Connoisseurs’.

Multiple-Exposure

Charles Swedlund

A set of 15 half-tone relief stereographs of nudes, exploring a variety of multiple-exposure techniques.
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.

Jules Richard

Glass plate stereo nudes taken in The Atrium of Jules Richard circa 1900.
Artistically posed nudes in outdoor settings from turn-of-the-century France.
As these glass plate slides are smaller than the stereo cards in the other sections, you might find 200% a better size for freeviewing.

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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