Figure 1.--This boy in 1887 was photographed with a strereo viewer. Strangely he is holding a regular portrait nd there are no stereocards on the table.

Stereoscopic photography was very popular in the Victorian era. This reproduced images in three dimensions. It is a process whose popularity waxed and waned--as it does now--reaching its heights in the mid-Victorian era. Few homes in the late-19th century were without an affordable stereoscopic viewer that presented a "3D" vision of popular scenes. I am not sure when they first appeared. We note a scene of a French studio where stereo view cards were being made, probanly in the 1860s. Notably boys and young women were employed there. We are not positive about just when stereo photography and the stereoscopic viewer were developed. The earliest example we have is from England in the mid-1850s, a Daguerreotype portrait of an unidentified family. Dag portraits were expensive. We note many more stereo portraits in the 1860s with the development of negative-based photography. They were almost iniversal in middle-class families by the 1870s. They were a very popular diversion in the Victorian home. At the time there were no movies and magazines did not yet have photographic images. Tghey are a wonderful source of information on the late-19th century. They came in a wide variety of subjects, including historic houses, ships, city and farm scenes, family scenes and many other topics. Most were informative, but some were made with a little humor such as a boy's sister and beau in the parlor. The boy friend eventually has to give the little brother a coin to leave them along.

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Created: October 15, 2003
Last updated: 6:25 PM 12/15/2007