The problem with stereoscopic photography is that it’s just not taken seriously enough. This is the view of two of the world’s leading experts on the subject who, sensing an injustice on an immeasurable scale, have teamed up to produce the first exhaustive history of the early decades of the phenomenon. The combined work of French photo-historian Denis Pellerin and Brian May, proprietor of the London Stereoscopic Company fine art publishing house, ‘Stereoscopy: The Dawn of 3-D’ is gloriously unconventional – almost as much as the characters that forged stereoscopic technology in the furnaces of the Industrial Revolution.
Unconventional because not many books these days come with an accompanying optical instrument. There’s a good reason to have one here because, no matter how compelling the story may be (particularly that of 19th-century innovator Charles Wheatstone), and no matter how absorbing the academically robust documentary research undoubtedly...