Stereo photography and stereo nude photography
In 2014 we celebrated the 175th. Jubilee year of photography, which from the beginning also took up the image of man as a subject as portrait and nude photography. The aim of the jules-richard-museum.com Museum is to present an encyclopedic-looking inventory from the beginnings of nude photography as a mono image and in stereo to the present using numerous stereo images to a broad public. In the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, stereo photos of city and landscape views, as well as genre and comic images, were an ever-popular, fascinating photo subject that illustrated and thereby introduced viewers to the distant lands and habits of unknown foreign races. That was also the time of the big world exhibitions, visitors couldn't and didn't have to travelthe "world" came to London, Paris, New York, Dublin, Vienna, Berlin, Philadelphia and wherever else.
Despite the renaissance of 3 D films in cinema and television, stereo photography is now the preserve of relatively few experts and the use of the new digital 3 D cameras has not changed this significantly.
The inventor of the most common stereo viewer today, Oliver Wendell Holmes, coined the phrase 150 years ago: "Photography is a mirror with a memory". Let's use this mirror, because at the same time photography made the people depicted a little immortal, preserving their image into the distant future, or as long as the storage media remain reproducible. Photography mechanized portrait studies and made them affordable for everyone as technology advanced. However, the same thing happened at the same time as pornography. Both went from a rich luxury good to a popular common good. The creative process was not only quicker to complete than painting, the depiction was far more realistic and no longer intentionally embellished, and the result of the work could be offered and sold significantly cheaper.
So it is not surprising that at the beginning of photography many painters changed gears and dedicated themselves to photography. Nevertheless, even in photography, an objective fact can be photographed very differently depending on the photographer's taste.
The capital of nude photography was Paris in the 19th century and Daguerre is said to have taken a photo in 1939 that depicted two nudes. This image is said to have only been discovered in 1955. However, due to the long exposure times required, these were only a male and a female sculpture. It was not until 1841 that it was possible to shorten the exposure times and thus also include living subjects. This was made possible by optics consisting of two lens bodies and by increased light sensitivity of the daguerrerotype plate. But even after these technical developments, the exposure time was still around 30 seconds long; so long that the models had to be supported in wooden frames positioned behind the person being photographed during the first nude shots.
Nudity was and is still a naturalness among primitive peoples today, is accepted as a living condition and was only abandoned under appropriate climatic conditions to protect the body. The Greeks idealized nudity as early as the 5th century before the birth of Christ, they made a cult of the male and female bodies, seeking ultimate perfection in form and proportions in both sexes. It seemed important to them to condition their bodies well so that they could show them proudly. The conceivable performances of these bodies were measured against each other in the Olympic Games and the winner was highly decorated.
Modern man of the 19th century. Jh. suppressed nudity under a burden of social, civil and religious taboos. All three very different behaviors, but also complicated mixtures of them, found their way into photography. The naked person was depicted as an "artist's model" or as "replicas from antiquity", people wrote "ethnologically scientific works" and "racial customers" in order to be able to depict strange people naked, or they brought the nude photos to evening parties without naming the photographer gentlemen on the market. Business flourished and sales increased when the beloved erotic photos could be viewed in 3 D with the appropriate stereo glasses. The sentence that was coined over a hundred years ago "Without doubt, nothing can draw attention to itself like the naked human body" is still absolutely valid today.
The aim of the Jules Richard Museum is also to make visible the changes in social morality using the example of these one-dimensional photos and stereo acts, which, with the exception of pornographic recordings in the 19th century, almost exclusively showed female motifs. The naked man only came to the fore as a subject at the beginning of the 20th century. The target group here was homosexual men.
All of these images document the change in photographers' ideals of beauty and morals as well as the sitter's penchant for self-dramatization. They demonstrate the transformation of the ideal image of the desirable woman from the 19th century through the boyish and emancipated figures of the twenties, the representation of the closeness to nature including the freedom signals of the nudist photos, but also show ambitious artistic representations in real or abstracted and laboratory-based illustrations to the most intimate, displayed sections of the body in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The broad spectrum of two-dimensional photography can also be found in stereo recordings, ranging from advertising to photojournalism, ethnology, the artistic acts of serious art photographers, to many private photographs and intimate photos with a self-presentational character, to obscene representations of individual specific primary characteristics. Even in the early days of photography, it was not only about portraits of the heads or entire body of the person depicted, but also about "displaying sexuality", about pornography to satisfy the monetary interests of photographers and salespeople and the voyeuristic inclinations of buyers and viewers.
The Jules Richard Museum shows a documentation of the history of stereo photography and can thus serve as a basis for discussion by all forums of nude and stereo photography on the aesthetics of "photography", the artistic statements of photographers, but also absolute rejections and tastelessness of image motifs and modes of representation.
However, it is not just the eye that directs the content in the image interpretation, but above all the photographer's intuition when taking the photo and the often intended sales goal of maximizing profits.
In the Jules Richard Museum, 1,000 stereo act photos of the collection of photographs of bodies that I have built up over many years are shown in identical image sizes to the original photographs, but sometimes also in enlargements for better viewing. Only the images from series maps, Viewmaster circular images and small-screen slide formats were displayed enlarged, as these could not be viewed without their special viewing devices. Most of the representations are stereo double images, which can be viewed spatially in all size images with the stereo glasses hanging or lying around everywhere in the museum, a lorgnette. To view the smaller number of anaglyph images, the necessary color glasses are also with the objects on display.
For the ambitious collector, the website contains an overview matrix that I developed to determine the age of the original exhibits of the collected treasures.
Countless reproductions of old stereo recordings, especially nude recordings, are now circulating on the Internet in the form of photo prints and as an image on CDs. If you are only interested in the image content, it may be an inexpensive introduction to the collecting field, as many original recordings are still available on the market today, if at all, usually at dizzying prices.
See historical examples of this: nudes (2D) and nudes.
Peter M. Stajkoski