Stereoscopy is Good For You: Life in 3-D

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The book focuses on the birth of stereoscopy in the mid-19th century and the enthusiasm with which Victorians embraced the 3D craze. But I thought, hey, these are images made by common people like us, and they have no influence on their government.

The whole of the LSC is only about six people, and five of us were involved in the book,’ he explains, ‘so it wasn’t a big team but it was a very hard-working one. There are some fantastic images in the book as you can see here (they are best viewed with Brian’s Owl viewer, available here). Support our vendors this winter and beyond If you can't visit your local vendor on a regular basis, then the next best way to support them is with a subscription to the Big Issue. It was as if they were actually there amongst the Great Pyramids of Giza, or looking up at the Matterhorn, or standing in the rice fields of China.

This publication should set a few things right about the history of the first thirty years of the medium and should put stereoscopy once more in the limelight, where it rightfully belongs. I encouraged people to capture in a 3-D photograph what hope they felt, what beauty they could find in that tough situation.

As regular readers will know, Brian May is a passionate evangelist for stereoscopic photography, and has been since Queen broke through in the 1970s. Suto-san is always open to suggestions too, a proper genius, and his pictures are also featured in Stereoscopy is Good for You. Featuring more than 100 photographers, the range of subjects in these modern stereo pictures is immense.But the older I get the more I think that is an essential part of being an artist, they need this questioning and insecurity to keep updated their view on the world and how they fit into it. Does Brian think that some would-be exponents are put off by the time involved in stereoscopic photography?

I published his book Scenes in our Village, chronicling the village where he grew up as a child, and I want to do more to tell his fascinating life story. Among the images in the book is a stereoscopic portrait of Dickens taken moments before he began reading extracts from his Christmas stories to an audience in 1858, and another of the author writing at his desk.

I've been working on magazines since 1995 and am also a keen travel and portrait photographer when time allows, reaching the finals of the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year contest in 2015 and achieving my Licentiate from the Royal Photographic Society the year before. Brian and Denis explore the emergence of stereoscopy and how the photographic medium became a world-wide sensation, whilst sharing fascinating 3-D Victorian images from their extensive archive to compliment the compelling narrative. Another revival came in the 1980s, and in 2009 “we had [the film] Avatar and every TV set you bought was 3D-ready.