In this installment of Sunday Travels, we take a look at Delft, The Hague, and Leiden - all in the areas around last week's subject, Rotterdam. These views prove to be far more superior, as they spend less time buying into stereotypes, and more time actually capturing their subjects.
Heathrow in 1950s 3D: “Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly.”
Douglas Adams hated Heathrow Airport. My wife likes it. Somewhere in between these points of view, there was the 1950s "London Airport", as captured here by VistaScreen. In this essay, we'll explore the nature of documentary stereography that was probably boring when shot but has become more interesting with the passage of time.
Sunday Travels #2: The Netherlands (Rotterdam)
In this installment of Sunday Travels, we take a look at Rotterdam, the second-largest city in The Netherlands, through century-old American eyes. We see some gorgeous scenes - and some dubious editorial influence on the part of Keystone View Company.
The Blue Grotto Aquarium at Eastbourne Redoubt
Benjamin White bought a Napoleonic-era coastal fort in 1957. Instead of turning it into a museum, his vision was a huge model village - and the bizarre Blue Grotto Aquarium. And who was on the scene to capture two weird attractions in one old fort? Why, Stanley Long of VistaScreen, of course!
Sunday Travels #1: The Netherlands (General Views)
A Brief Introduction to "Sunday Travels" This series on The Netherlands is the first in an ongoing weekly series that will focus on various travel stereoviews. My wife has "encouraged" me to thin out the boxes upon boxes I have lying about. Boxes of stereoscopic treasures which happen to be cluttering up our microscopic smallish …
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VistaScreen’s “Venezia”: Sterescopic 3D photography of the canals, monuments, and buildings of 1950s Venice
In our first full look at a non-Anglocentric series from VistaScreen, in the bilingually-captioned "Venezio". Featuring above-average stereography, this series raises some questions about the provenance of the images - and raises doubts about whether Stanley Long was involved with these at all!
Series: Holland in the 1950s
No better or worse than the first two post-war Raumbild-Verlag Siegfried Brandmüller "Europa" series, this look at Holland in the 1950s pretty much gives us a cursory tour of Amsterdam, as well as an obligatory view of a windmill which looks to have been taken from a car window.
Bertram Mills Circus III: The Grand Show in 3D and Final Thoughts on All 30 cards
In this third and final part of a series on VistaScreen's stereoviews featuring the Bertram Mills Circus, we look at the inferior (but scarcer) "Night" version of Series 46, which replaced the "Day" version at some point in time. We also look at possible times these photos were taken, the performers who appear in them, and the problems with shooting on slow glass plates in the dark.
Bertram Mills Circus II: Clowning Around, Balancing on Elephants, Riding a Pony, and Taming the American Indian Caricatures
In the second installment (out of three) focused on the wonders of the three VistaScreen series on the Bertram Mills Circus, I document my personal journey over the course of the last couple of years to complete Series 46 - which led to my discovery of two more complete 10-card sets, and to a fascination with VistaScreen. We also delve into the reasons why there are two alternate sets with the same designation - including the theory that some rather racially unacceptable portrayals of American Indians caused the company to change from this relatively quaint "Day Series" to the more formal, and more scarce, "Night Series".
Bertram Mills Circus I: Getting Ready for the Ballyhoo Under the Big Top
Out of love of all things circus, my very first series of images on this blog was VistaScreen C.62 "Bertram Mills Circus". This is more or less a redux of that series, revamped to greatly improve the image quality, display options, and anaglyphs, with some new information. This is the first in a series of three posts focused on 1950s VistaScreen stereography of Britain's answer to RB&BB - Bertram Mills Circus - because who doesn't love the Big Top?