'Poor man's picture gallery': Victorian Art and Stereoscopic Photography

Intriguing exhibition at Tate Britain looking at Victorian Stereographs designed to be shown in hand held stereoscopes.

As photography got more sophisticated there was a fashion for staging tableaux with real people to reproduce famous paintings in this medium. The show included a number of paintings which had been reproduced in this way alongside the original and stereoscope images as well as showing a recreating of the image in a stereoscope to show you how it worked. The images and bank of stereoscopes were all lent by Brian May.

A version of Henry Wallis’s Chatterton sparked a copyright case looking at whether staging and photographing a composition was a breach of copyright. I loved the fact that you couldn’t use real dogs in the photographs due to the long exposer time so stuffed ones had to be used such as in a staging of Millais’s “Order of Release”.

There were also a couple of pictures which had been influenced by the technique such as Egley’s “Omnibus in London” which uses some of the ideas that made stereoscopes successful.

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