Cathy's Art Diary

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 Lo...