Transcending Perspective: the Visual Phenomenology of Stephen Shore’S 1974 Stereographs New York, New York

Transcending Perspective: The Visual Phenomenology of Stephen Shore’s 1974 Stereographs New York, New York

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Art History Department in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art History at Savannah College of Art and Design

Rachel K. Treide Savannah, Georgia © November 2018

The author hereby grants SCAD permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created.

Rachel Treide Author Date Lisa Jaye Young, PhD Committee chair Date Capri Rosenberg, PhD Committee member Date

Dedication

For my Father, who gave me my first cameras and so much more.

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Acknowledgements

I am profoundly grateful for the encouragement, guidance and support of my two committee members, Dr. Lisa Jaye Young and Dr. Capri Rosenberg. The direction of my interests has been shaped by the ideas that I encountered while studying under each of you—concepts that form the foundations of this thesis. Dr. Young, thank you for always receiving my ideas with enthusiasm and running with them even further; your creative insights and direction have helped me take this topic to new heights. I am forever grateful to you for introducing me to the world of photo theory and revealing another beautiful facet of this medium that I love so much. Dr. Rosenberg, thank you for your mentorship, encouragement and friendship over the past two years. Taking YBA with you reminded me of my purpose here at SCAD and you have introduced me to so many concepts that I cannot imagine ever being without again. I have learned an incredible amount from you.

I would also like to extend my thanks to the other Art History faculty members here at SCAD who have shared their knowledge with me and shaped my mind. Dr. DiFuria, thank you for your dedication to excellence and your enthusiasm for this topic from the start. Dr. Jackson, thank you for embracing and encouraging the poetic within the academic. I am equally am indebted to the SCAD Photography department for taking my artistic practice to new heights. I’d like to thank Rebecca Nolan and Steve Mosch for their role in my progression as an artist and photographer; my work has transformed and improved greatly thanks to your critique and guidance. I’d also like to thank the professors who shaped the first half of my academic career at Lipscomb University, who taught me the importance of developing conceptual underpinnings in all that I do.

For my friends in Nashville—your continual friendship, love and encouragement over the past two years, as I embarked upon and am now completing this journey in Savannah, has meant the world to me. For my friends in Savannah—Alanna Loreto Rodriguez, your friendship, sense of humor and our tradition of eating rotisserie chicken in the grocery store parking lot every Wednesday has sustained me during this season of life. I’m grateful to have gone through his process together and I’m so proud of what you have accomplished! Jemma, Sinéad and Nicol—thank you for every encouragement and invigorating conversation, my friends. You have made Savannah home.

I’m particularly grateful for the unending love, support and prayers from my wonderful family. Mom, thank you for every phone call, care package and prayer over the past five years. Dad, thank you for always having the scientific answers and for your unending support. I love sharing a passion for photography with you. An emphatic thank you to Nancy Skinner whose support and generosity made this research possible.

Finally, this thesis would not exist without Stephen Shore. Your work and ideas have had an immeasurable impact on myself and so many others, and it has been an honor not only to write, but also consult you, about this most fascinating part of your oeuvre. Thank you for your continual generosity throughout this process. Your way of seeing the world is just as beautiful and profound as the artworks that you create.

Table of Contents Abstract ...... vii

List of Figures ...... viii

I. Introduction ...... 1

New York, New York ...... 3

II. Chapter I: Stereography ...... 16

Logistics of Stereography ...... 16

The History of Stereoscopic Technology ...... 18

The Crucial Combination ...... 20

III. Chapter II: Downfall ...... 23

Amnesia in Popular Culture ...... 23

Challenges to a Historiography ...... 25

Old Medium, New Problems ...... 27

Problematic Art Object ...... 29

Potential Solutions ...... 34

IV. Chapter III: Perspective ...... 35

The Evolution of Perspective ...... 35

Photography Changes Everything ...... 40

The Deceptive Monocular Viewpoint ...... 41

The Stereograph as Liberator ...... 43

V: Chapter IV: Phenomenology ...... 45

Art & Phenomenology ...... 45

The Stereograph as Phenomenological Medium ...... 47

Stephen Shore: A Lifetime of Perceiving ...... 53

VI. Conclusion ...... 60

Bibliography ...... 61

Figures ...... 65

Abstract

This thesis seeks the merger of the heretofore unexplored and undocumented connections between the stereograph, the development of perspective throughout Art

History, and the philosophy of human perception. Taking American photographer

Stephen Shore’s collection of 1974 stereographs, New York, New York, as point of departure, it will ask how the stereograph may play a larger role in the history of art and the development of perspective than historians have acknowledged. Application of

Phenomenologist Edmund Husserl’s principle of intersubjectivity will reveal the stereograph as a phenomenological medium and propose new theoretical implications of the stereographic image. Finally, this thesis aims to bring a previously unexamined body of work by one of the most important photographers of the last century into the light to be discussed and appreciated, positing New York, New York as another stunning project in

Shore’s phenomenologically-focused career.

Keywords: Stephen Shore, stereography, photography, perspective, Phenomenology,

Edmund Husserl, reality, intersubjectivity

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List of Figures

Figure 1. Visitors at MoMA’s Stephen Shore retrospective view Shore’s stereographs, New York, New York, through metal viewing boxes. May 4 2018. Image courtesy of the author.

Figure 2. Stephen Shore, New York, New York (1974) published in View-Master format. Photo courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art online, https://store.moma.org/prints- artists/artist-products/stephen-shore-stereographs-1974/200498-200498.html.

Figure 3. Stephen Shore, Trail’s End Restaurant, Kanab, Utah, August 10, 1973, 1973. Image from Stephen Shore, Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, and Lynne Tillman, Uncommon Places: The Complete Works, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Aperture, 2015), 33.

Figure 4. Stephen Shore, Lookout Hotel, Ogunquit, Maine, July 16, 1974, 1974. Image from Stephen Shore, Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, and Lynne Tillman, Uncommon Places: The Complete Works, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Aperture, 2015), 75.

Figure 5. Stephen Shore, “Reel 1, image 1 of Shore’s 2018 View-Master, published by Aperture,” New York, New York, November 1974, stereograph consisting of two Kodachrome color positive film slides, 24mm x 23mm, in cardboard mount, 4 in. by 1 5/8 in. Private collection of Stephen Shore, © Stephen Shore, Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.

Figure 6. Stephen Shore, “Reel 1, image 2 of Shore’s 2018 View-Master, published by Aperture,” New York, New York, November 1974, stereograph consisting of two Kodachrome color positive film slides, 24mm x 23mm, in cardboard mount, 4 in. by 1 5/8 in. Private collection of Stephen Shore, © Stephen Shore, Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.

Figure 7. Stephen Shore, “Reel 5, image 2 of Shore’s 2018 View-Master, published by Aperture,” New York, New York, November 1974, stereograph consisting of two Kodachrome color positive film slides, 24mm x 23mm, in cardboard mount, 4 in. by 1 5/8 in. Private collection of Stephen Shore, © Stephen Shore, Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.

Figure 8. Stephen Shore, “Reel 2, image 3 of Shore’s 2018 View-Master, published by Aperture,” New York, New York, November 1974, stereograph consisting of two Kodachrome color positive film slides, 24mm x 23mm, in cardboard mount, 4 in. by 1 5/8 in. Private collection of Stephen Shore, © Stephen Shore, Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.

Figure 9. Stephen Shore, “Reel 2, image 5 of Shore’s 2018 View-Master, published by Aperture,” New York, New York, November 1974, stereograph consisting of two Kodachrome color positive film slides, 24mm x 23mm, in cardboard mount, 4 in. by 1

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5/8 in. Private collection of Stephen Shore, © Stephen Shore, Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.

Figure 10. Stephen Shore, “Reel 2, image 6 of Shore’s 2018 View-Master, published by Aperture,” New York, New York, November 1974, stereograph consisting of two Kodachrome color positive film slides, 24mm x 23mm, in cardboard mount, 4 in. by 1 5/8 in. Private collection of Stephen Shore, © Stephen Shore, Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.

Figure 11. Stephen Shore, “Reel 3, image 1 of Shore’s 2018 View-Master, published by Aperture,” New York, New York, November 1974, stereograph consisting of two Kodachrome color positive film slides, 24mm x 23mm, in cardboard mount, 4 in. by 1 5/8 in. Private collection of Stephen Shore, © Stephen Shore, Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.

Figure 12. Stephen Shore, “Reel 4, image 1 of Shore’s 2018 View-Master, published by Aperture,” New York, New York, November 1974, stereograph consisting of two Kodachrome color positive film slides, 24mm x 23mm, in cardboard mount, 4 in. by 1 5/8 in. Private collection of Stephen Shore, © Stephen Shore, Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.

Figure 13. Stephen Shore, “Reel 4, image 6 of Shore’s 2018 View-Master, published by Aperture,” New York, New York, November 1974, stereograph consisting of two Kodachrome color positive film slides, 24mm x 23mm, in cardboard mount, 4 in. by 1 5/8 in. Private collection of Stephen Shore, © Stephen Shore, Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.

Figure 14. Stephen Shore, “Reel 1, image 6 of Shore’s 2018 View-Master, published by Aperture,” New York, New York, November 1974, stereograph consisting of two Kodachrome color positive film slides, 24mm x 23mm, in cardboard mount, 4 in. by 1 5/8 in. Private collection of Stephen Shore, © Stephen Shore, Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.

Figure 15. Stephen Shore, “Reel 3, image 4 of Shore’s 2018 View-Master, published by Aperture,” New York, New York, November 1974, stereograph consisting of two Kodachrome color positive film slides, 24mm x 23mm, in cardboard mount, 4 in. by 1 5/8 in. Private collection of Stephen Shore, © Stephen Shore, Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.

Figure 16. Stephen Shore, “Reel 1, image 5 of Shore’s 2018 View-Master, published by Aperture,” New York, New York, November 1974, stereograph consisting of two Kodachrome color positive film slides, 24mm x 23mm, in cardboard mount, 4 in. by 1 5/8 in. Private collection of Stephen Shore, © Stephen Shore, Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.

Figure 17. Wheatstone stereoscope schema. Image courtesy of Wikipedia online, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Charles_Wheatstone.

Figure 18. Sir David Brewster’s handheld stereograph, invented in 1849. Image courtesy of Research Gate online, https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Brewster-stereoscope- 1849-10_fig1_282015090.

Figure 19. Oliver Wendell Holmes’ handheld stereograph, invented in 1859. Image courtesy of Visualizing NYC online, http://visualizingnyc.org/essays/the-scientific- magic-behind-stereoviews-3-d-realism/.

Figure 20. French Table Top Stereoscope Cabinet Viewer (exterior). Image courtesy of Fleaglass online, http://www.fleaglass.com/ads/french-table-top-stereoscope-cabinet- viewer/.

Figure 21. French Table Top Stereoscope Cabinet Viewer (interior view showing metal wire stereocard holders/advancing system). Image courtesy of Fleaglass online, http://www.fleaglass.com/ads/french-table-top-stereoscope-cabinet-viewer/.

Figure 22. Pythagoras’ tetractys. Image courtesy of Steemit beta online, https://steemit.com/mathematics/@xavierhorsechode/my-findings-with-the-tetractys-and- applying-the-doulbing-pattern-of-124875-with-in-potential-unknown-knowledge.

x Introduction

Common objects are transformed in the hands of an artist. Even items or

“gadgets” long thought of simply as toys can transcend the ordinary to become incredible tools for the production of meaning when paired with an inquisitive mind, a keen eye and a technically proficient hand. Perhaps it takes an artist to change our perception of common materials, to illuminate the overlooked. Since its inception in 1838 in the U.K., predating the first photograph by a year, the stereograph’s artistic application has been largely overlooked. The stereograph is a form of photography in which two photographs are taken from slightly different positions, producing two images whose vantage points approximate the distance between the human eyes. When viewed through a viewing device called a stereoscope, the viewer’s left eye views the left photograph while the right eye views the right photograph, mimicking the way the human eyes perceive the world. The brain processes and reconciles these two images into a single visual field, resulting in what appears to be a three-dimensional photograph and allowing the viewer to perceive spatial depth within the photographed scene.

Stereography and its history is an under-recognized area of photography and the format of stereography is not used by many artists or photographers. Although a popular image-making method from its inception until the early 1900s, it was largely overlooked as an artistic medium because it was perceived as a toy, an educational tool, or as a novel cousin of the much more versatile and ubiquitous photograph. Yet when a skillful practitioner of photographic vision such as Stephen Shore decides to explore the unusual invention, it is transformed into an unexpected means of re-thinking subjective perception of the world, even a way to visualize Edmund Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity.

In 1974, Shore spent two months making stereographs with a Stereo Realist camera, creating illusory, seemingly three-dimensional images on 35mm Kodachrome color positive film. Shore, committed to self-reinvention and photographic problem- solving, was “interested in seeking out situations in which the camera was doing something different from how our eyes see things,” yet he ended up producing a body of work that exposes the historical significance and philosophical potential of the stereograph.1 Shore’s stereographs of New York City street life, storefronts and still lifes, dominated by linear compositions, align with his lifelong interest in the photograph’s ability to render three-dimensional space and the color photograph’s capacity to convey what the artist describes as “the taste of an age.”2 Despite Shore’s successful and well- documented career, these stereographs have been exhibited only twice and to date have not received sustained scholarly analysis. This little-known body of work, it will be argued, makes evident the profound capacity of the stereograph to deepen perceptual awareness, connecting to both space and bodies in space in a way that photography could only suggest with its limitation of flatness.

Taking subjective experience with and analysis of Shore’s stereographs as its point of departure, this thesis will explore the history of the stereograph, from its inception in 1838 in Britain by Sir Charles Wheatstone, and partnership with the photograph through to its subsequent success and gradual decline in popularity after the

1920s. It will consider the fundamental differences between monocular and stereoscopic

1 Aperture Foundation, Stephen Shore Stereographs New York, 1974 (Aperture Foundation, 2018). This is the pamphlet included in Aperture’s 2018 publication of Shore’s 30 stereographs (New York, New York, 1974) in View-Master format. 2 “Stephen Shore American Surfaces,” video file, 09:09, Vimeo, posted by Spike Productions, 2011, accessed October 28, 2018, https://vimeo.com/32521780. In this interview, Shore states: “Every culture and every age has a palette. And it seems to me that if I’m going to communicate something of the taste of the age I’m living in, there’s something about color that can communicate elements that I cannot communicate in black and white.”

photography, and ask how the stereograph may play a larger role in the development of perspective than historians have previously acknowledged. It will discuss Shore’s stereographs in the context of the perpetual human desire to simulate and capture phenomenal reality through the implementation and development of perspective, manifested in various visual mediums throughout art history. Finally, this essay considers the phenomenological ideas and practices in Shore’s work and career and considers his stereographs in light of phenomenologist Edmund Husserl’s ideas regarding the relationship of perception to the body. Informed by my direct experience with Stephen

Shore’s stereographs, this consideration activates a more complete understanding of the historical significance and the phenomenological aspects of New York, New York.

A understudied medium, the stereograph continues an ancient line of inquiry and asks a multiplicity of questions: How can we use technology to imitate the human perception of space, objects and the world around us? How do the resulting works of art explore what it means or what it is like to consciously exist in the world? And how do these advances influence the way we think about consciousness, about our perception of the world, and about the spatial and cognitive perception and experience of others?

New York, New York

It was not until Shore, together with the Chief Curator of Photography at The

Museum of Modern Art, Quentin Bajac, was compiling his 2017–2018 retrospective at

MoMA that his past forays into stereography were rediscovered.3 Shore has a long history with MoMA, beginning in 1962 when he sold three black and white prints to

3 “Stephen Shore | MoMA Live,” video file, 39:17, YouTube, posted by The Museum of Modern Art, November 15, 2017, accessed October 28, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y40n-sifbcw.

Photography Curator Edward Steichen at age 14.4 Shore’s work was thereafter included in many group shows at MoMA and a solo show in 1976 at age 29.5 There are over a dozen books dedicated exclusively to Shore’s work (3 of which are solely concerned with

Shore’s most well-known body of work, Uncommon Places), many of which contain insightful essays by curators, photographers and writers about the meaning and (often cultural) significance of Shore’s work and career. Furthermore, Shore’s work is included in many other publications alongside the work of his contemporaries, and the reach and impact of his photographs within the worlds of contemporary art and photography cannot be overstated. Shore’s work is often analyzed within the context of his place within a group of photographers who captured an increasingly industrialized and brutalized landscape (particularly the American West) during the 1970s and gathered in a 1975 show, New Topographics,6 at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York.7 As a result, there is a great deal of excellent scholarship on nearly every aspect of Shore’s oeuvre, from his role as a pioneer of color photography to the nuanced conceptual underpinnings of each of his projects. However, there is presently zero scholarship on

Shore’s stereographs because, until Shore’s 2017–2018 retrospective, they had remained hidden for over 40 years, unknown to the public and perhaps even forgotten by the artist himself.

4 Christy Lange, “Nothing Overlooked,” in Stephen Shore, by Stephen Shore, et al. (London; New York, NY: Phaidon Press, 2007), 42. 5 Stephen Shore et al., Stephen Shore (New York, NY: Phaidon Press, 2007), 147. 6 Museum of Modern Art, “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape,” SFMOMA, accessed October 1, 2018, https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/new-topographics/. Defined as “a turning point in the history of photography,” the work of the ten photographers featured in the New Topographics exhibition “signaled a radical shift away from traditional depictions of landscape. Pictures of transcendent natural vistas gave way to unromanticized views of stark industrial landscapes, suburban sprawl, and everyday scenes not usually given a second glance.” Shore’s work was shown alongside and subsequently conceptually grouped with the work of Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, and Henry Wessel, all of whom share an affinity for capturing quiet moments and a penchant for capitalizing on the strengths of the photographic series. 7 Shore et al., Stephen Shore, 146.

While reviewing the photographer’s varied and lengthy career in preparation for the retrospective, Bajac and Shore noticed many areas of Shore’s work that had remained unpublished or rarely-exhibited. The stereographs were, according to Shore, “one of the surprises of the show”—a surprise that had a profound impact on a contemporary audience.8 Shore’s collection of thirty stereographs, collectively titled New York, New

York, although made in November of 1974, had only been publicly exhibited once before

(and partially at that—only 12 or 15 out of 30 were displayed), in a show at Light Gallery in New York City in 1975 where Shore was represented at the time.9 For his retrospective at MoMA, three metal stereoscopic viewing devices, each containing 10 unique stereoviews, were provided for the viewing of the stereographs (figure 1). Seated on square cushions, attendees peered through the two lenses to view the stereoslides illuminated within, pressing a button on the right side of the stereoscope’s metal body to momentarily turn off the interior bulbs and advance to the next stereoview which, once in place for viewing, would be illuminated from behind to reveal the next scene. On a visit to MoMA in May 2018, I spent several hours with New York, New York, and was able to not only study the work but also observe the comments of other visitors to Shore’s retrospective as they sat down at the viewers beside me. Initial expressions of shock and amazement were often followed by murmurs of admiration as people lost themselves in the stereographs and the familiar call to companions of, “You have to come see this!”

Many people marveled aloud at the seemingly three-dimensional images that they were seeing, often audibly wondering how Shore had managed to create such incredible, self- contained worlds.

8 “Stephen Shore | MoMA Live,” video file. 9 Stephen Shore, “1974 Stereographs,” e-mail message to author, August 14, 2018.

Using a Stereo Realist camera, a model created by the David White Company during the “manufacturing boom of the post-World War II years,” loaded with 35mm

Kodachrome color positive film, Shore briefly experimented with stereography, creating images of New York City in late fall.10 When exhibited the following year, visitors to

Light Gallery expressed shock and amazement at the stereographs, and their sentiments are recorded in the gallery’s guestbook—“one commenter hoped Shore would start a

‘stereoscopic revolution,’ and another humorously wrote, ‘your stereoscopic bathroom sink will haunt me.’”11 However, despite their powerful effect and documented appeal,

Shore never again pursued or exhibited any further work with stereographic cameras (for reasons that will be explained further on in this thesis) and they remained unseen until

Shore’s retrospective.12 The stereographs remained in Shore’s private collection, unavailable to collectors until September 2018 when Aperture Publishing released a limited edition View-Master and corresponding reels containing all thirty stereographs that make up New York, New York (figure 2). The set, available for $250 on Aperture’s website, consists of “a stereographic viewer, five viewing reels, with 6 images each plus

1 title card, signed and numbered by the artist in an edition of 400.”13

In the figures following this essay I have organized the stereographs according to the sequence in which Aperture has organized them on the View-Master reels, and will refer to them by this method so that anyone reading this thesis who also has access to the

View-Master can locate and view the precise stereograph that I am referencing

10 Kristen Gaylord, “Stereographs,” in Stephen Shore, by Quentin Bajac, et al., comp. The Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 2017), 218. 11 Gaylord, “Stereographs,” 218. 12 Stephen Shore, “1974 Stereographs,” e-mail message to author. 13 Aperture Foundation, “Stephen Shore: Stereographs NEW YORK, 1974,” Aperture, accessed October 28, 2018, https://aperture.org/shop/stephen-shore-limited-edition-stereograph/.

(stereograph number out of 30, reel number, image number on the respective reel).

However, it should be noted that the stereographs cannot properly be seen in the figures of this thesis, nor are they printed in the MoMA’s exhibition book in a way that allows for stereo viewing.14 A reproduction of the physical art object, the stereocard or positive film slides, can be shown but not the perceptual effect of the image when viewed through a stereoscope.

Shore was sensitive to these limitations and attributes of the stereoscopic camera and resulting stereograph, not only in their exhibition and publication, but also in the way in which a stereograph would communicate depth within an image. In the short essay that accompanied New York, New York in View-Master format, Shore stated that while working with the Stereo Realist he was “interested in seeking out situations in which the camera was doing something different from how our eyes see things.”15 As a result, he chose subject matter and compositions that were specifically adept at enhancing the stereograph’s illusionistic qualities, his choices including “reflections, windows, a shadow on a chain-link fence, [and] a rug that seems to float off the ground.”16

To experience Shore’s stereographs is to be given a new pair of eyes. The viewer is offered a window onto a multiplicity of locations in time and space, frozen in vivid color at the moment of capture and placed just beyond reach. The perceptual effect of the stereograph is universally experienced when viewed with both eyes, but the sensations and associations that arise upon contemplation of the work are subjective and unique to

14 Quentin Bajac et al., Stephen Shore, comp. The Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 2017), 205, 218-221. The stereographs could have been printed in the exhibition book in a manner that would allow for viewing with the cross-eyed freeview method, as many publications and websites do; rather, a scan of the physical the stereocard mounted with both positive film photographs is printed in the book. Due to copyright restraints, New York, New York cannot be printed in this thesis in a format that would allow for freeviewing. 15 Aperture Foundation, Stephen Shore. 16 Aperture Foundation, Stephen Shore.

each individual viewer. In writing about my experiences with New York, New York, I provide a personal, and therefore highly subjective, account of the phenomenal effect of

Shore’s stereographs. Many of the feelings that arose upon contemplation of the images of New York, New York were similar to those I experience when viewing photographs from Uncommon Places. I am in a dream world when I view a great many of Shore’s images. I become some immaterial presence floating above a buttery stack of diner pancakes or an unfinished jigsaw puzzle splayed out upon a plastic, mustard yellow quilted tablecloth, as in Trail’s End Restaurant, Kanab, Utah, August 10, 1973 (figure 3) and Lookout Hotel, Ogunquit, Maine, July 16, 1974 (figure 4), respectively, from

Uncommon Places.

A similar feeling arises as I float above a green, woven Ikat rug, as seen in the first stereograph from New York, New York (reel 1, image 1, figure 5). I can hover forever above this rug and enjoy its perfect square within square, but I can never touch it or close the gap between it and myself. The camera has determined where I will be suspended forever, although my body tells me otherwise, and feels as though it can reach out and touch the space of this other world, this other moment in time, affixed inside the frame. I am the sole witness to the absolute stillness each of scene; transfixed by the frozen light, I am alone, forever observing, static, stuck. I am in a trance. Yet I can break this hallucination by simply pressing the button that advances to the next stereograph and when the new view is illuminated I wake up in a new dream. There is a certain shock and surprise felt in the moment when progressing from one stereograph to the next, when I am torn form one scene and thrust into another, equally as real and vibrant as the last. I close my eyes and wake up somewhere entirely new, the limitations of the body negated.

This feeling of entering another time and place, of being a disembodied node of perception or of being in the photographer’s body that I experience when viewing

Shore’s stereographs is due, in part, to the method by which Shore created these images—with a handheld camera at the height of his eyes. The angle that Shore employed in many of these stereographs, making exposures from his viewpoint approximately six feet above the ground, mimics a human viewpoint of the world and, when combined with the illusion of three-dimensional space and the strategic use of linear elements, feels akin to inhabiting Shore’s eyes. This effect is most clearly seen in stereographs numbers 2, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 19, 22, and 26. In stereograph number 2

(reel 1, image 2, figure 6), I look down at a fraction of hot dog stand, bright light glinting off its polished metallic surfaces. For a moment I am convinced that I could reach out and pull a napkin free or run my palm across the smooth polished metal of the cart. Cans of 7-

Up and Pepsi-Cola rest on the counter and I can practically feel their weight, gauging how it might feel to reach forward and free one of them from its flimsy plastic six-pack ring. I feel as though I have traded my body for someone else’s; not only have I changed perspectives but I have traveled backwards in time as well. In stereograph 26 (reel 5, image 2, figure 7) I again expect a hand—perhaps my own? perhaps Shore’s—to reach in from the bottom of the frame and grab a bag of onion rings. I can almost hear the plastic bag crinkle as it is wrenched from one of the metal clips that holds a cascade of snack food in neat vertical columns. This angle that Shore makes use of is slightly disorienting until the mind gets its bearings and I realize that I am looking down, that I have traded my field of perception for Shore’s, my eyes for his.

Stereograph number 9 (reel 2, image 3, figure 8) shows a woman’s arm, encased in a thick, leopard-print fur coat, pushing a small cart containing a brown paper bag and other groceries, the yellow paint on the blacktop cutting diagonally through the scene. I know just how it might feel to grab the paper bag, the folds and creases that my hands would find, and can imagine its weight. The linear details that Shore has included—the yellow stripe of paint, the presence of a sewer grate, the gleaming metal bars of the woman’s cart, even the arm and body of the leopard coat—create a complex array of lines and triangles and form an “X” within the frame. The scene feels spontaneous and yet the composition is careful, every element intentional. I wonder if Shore asked her to

“hold still,” or if everything coalesced just so amidst the flurry of New York City’s street life.

Several of Shore’s stereographs stop my heart mid-beat and cause my jaw to drop—the scene before me feels so real. This shock is quickly followed by revelry in

Shore’s ability to transform the familiar act of seeing the ordinary into something transcendent. In stereograph number 11 (reel 2, image 5, figure 9) I find myself looking down at a tile floor; I see the bottom hems of two ladies’ winter coats, their stocking-clad legs emerging from beneath smooth swaths of fabric and ending in patent leather kitten heel loafers. The midday light is bright and white and the scene is an interplay of tile pattern and shadows; soft flesh against hard tile, a delicate highlight gracing the leg of the woman on the left in the red coat, accentuating the gentle curve of her calf. Shore has found these moments of quiet visual poetry and captured them so succinctly, crafting a visual memory that I can inhabit over forty years later.

Stereograph number 12 (reel 2, image 6, figure 10) is one of the most unique and unexpected of all 30 images, consisting of nothing more than a narrow view of an anonymous, nondescript patch of ground, simply dirt and trash. Even with nothing to delineate space, no lines or elements to communicate distinct areas of foreground, middle ground or background, there is still space. Despite the absence of linear elements that would denote the recession of space towards the top of the frame, I can still intuit the empty space hanging over the packed earth merely through the viewing of two slightly different images. Like the impulse of a phantom-limb, I feel the unreal pressure to lift my head from the ground in front of me, to raise my eyes to see what is just ahead.17 I cannot ascertain any “empirical knowledge of the contents of the off-frame, but at the same time cannot help imagining some off-frame, hallucinating it, dreaming the shape of this emptiness.”18 I do not and cannot know anything other than what the photograph shows me. I am reminded of a particular passage of Susan Sontag’s On Photography, in which she writes,

The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: “There is the surface. Now think—or rather feel, intuit—what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.” Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.19

I lean, mind and body, into these slices of common moments passed, longing to know more about them, to feel more, or to hop inside of each one and inhabit its space and

17 This sense of a phantom-limb—a body(part) that one feels that he should have yet doesn’t—is an important part of the development of holographic and virtual experiences. We can simulate a shift in almost all of our perceptions through imitation and recreation (stereographs, binaural audio, the recreation of smells), but we are still reaching to increase our capacity to simulate the feeling of physically being in space. The increasing number of immersive 3D experiences in which participants are submerged in a physically or digitally fabricated world attests to our desire to transcend the limitations of our bodies and fully immerse ourselves in fantasy environments. 18 Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (New York: Routledge, 2003), 143. 19 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York, NY: Picador, 1973), 8.

time. Each stereo image is inexhaustible—as much as I know and as much as I can see, something is permanently out of reach. The ambiguity of each image tantalizes me, raising an endless number of unanswerable questions.

Much like the visitor to Light Gallery’s 1975 show who wrote in the gallery’s guestbook that Shore’s stereoview number 13 of a bathroom sink (reel 3, image 1, figure

11) would “haunt” her, I, too, am haunted by this image even months after first viewing it at Shore’s retrospective in December of 2017.20 It is just a bathroom sink, and yet a quiet, precious moment of ephemeral afternoon light is frozen, preserved. Soft sunlight streams in from an unidentified window to illuminate a wall of cream-colored tiles and a white porcelain sink upon which rests a crinkled tube of toothpaste—I’m tempted to remind the owner to pick up some more, he’s almost out. A glass shelf juts out toward me, almost invisible if not for its edge taking on the jade green opacity of thick cut glass. A small shelf holding a soap dish and a thin oval of soap, made smooth and small from repetitive usage, extends towards me; the whole scene offers itself into my own space, reaching toward me even as I feel compelled to reach into it.

So many of Shore’s stereographs beckon the body’s engagement, urging involvement in the space that is so convincingly in front of me yet so clearly in the past.

A pile of grapefruits and oranges sit motionless in the corner of a glass-walled shop in stereograph number 19 (reel 4, image 1, figure 12), the delicate skin of the fruit in sharp contrast with the hardness of the tiles that form the interior and exterior of the storefront.

The color in this particular stereograph is wonderfully delicate and enormously pleasing; bright yellow and orange fruit rest on pale turquoise tiles inside the storefront window, above cornflower blue Spanish tiles just below, affixed to the building’s facade. The

20 Gaylord, “Stereographs,” 218.

stereograph invites me to stay and bask awhile in its world, lit by the warm afternoon light, to allow myself to be fully seduced by the visual. I am looking down, contemplating the contrast of the spherical, fleshy fruit and the linear, hard, impenetrable architecture that contains it, and I feel as though I could kick the blue tiles in front of me.

My leg tenses as I move to tap the patterned tile with the toe of my shoe, or turn over the dirty rag on the sidewalk to peer at what lies underneath, if anything. My mind wanders into the depths of the scene, as my own present time and space fade away.

In several stereographs, Shore consciously used linear elements in order to exacerbate the perception of depth within the resulting stereograph, paying careful consideration to the involvement of the z-axis within the scene.21 This tactic is seen most prominently in stereographs 4, 5, 6, 14, 18, 24, and 25. Sometimes these linear elements are literally lines present in the scene, receding along surfaces as they stretch into the distance, as in stereograph 24 (reel 4, image 6, figure 13), which features a mother and daughter frozen on a sidewalk corner, forever waiting to cross the street. The evening light strikes their backs and sends their shadows long ahead of them, on their way across the street before their owners can follow. Like so much of Shore’s work, the presence and quality of light becomes the image’s raison d'être, and Shore capitalizes on light’s ability to transform the banal into something transcendent purely by illumination. Each of his stereographs encourages me to revel in the very pleasure of seeing, to bask in the ethereality and ephemerality of light itself. The white paint on the pavement delineating the crosswalk forms a right angle, a wide “V,” opening up the scene, stretching the depth,

21 When viewing a stereograph, we are not kept outside the scene depicted—our eyes can move within the illustrated space and are not bound to the surface of the image. The eye travels not only on the x and y- axes, horizontally and vertically until it encounters the frame, but also has the impression of traveling along the z-axis, diagonally into the scene.

making it apparent. My eyes float around the open expanse of empty space that is the middle of the four-way intersection, reaching to explore the brick building, parked cars, and yellow side warning of an alternate route in effect from 4 pm to 7pm, Monday through Friday, on the opposite side.

Even with all of this space to explore, I am drawn back to the two figures; the delicateness of the little girl, holding a fragile cluster of leaves (perhaps a serendipitous find encountered on the walk home from school), crossing her legs against the November cold as she stands and waits for the light to turn. Her plush pink coat has a white fur trim on the hood that is pulled up to shield her from the wind, and her mother reaches down to clasp her little hand in her own. I am given endless time to remain in this single moment, examining this frozen world, and the longer I study the scene the more small details become apparent: the mother’s lifted heel, her flexed calf muscle, the presence of other figures in the crosswalk just outside the frame, indicated only by the presence of their shadows. It all feels so real, and I’m nearly certain that any moment now the pair will break free of their eternal poses and move to cross the street. Yet they can no more animate themselves than I can enter their world, and again a sense of disembodiment arises as my perception of the world and the flow of time become divorced.

Sometimes Shore intentionally confused the space within the stereographic scene through the use of linear elements, layering glass panes and reflective surfaces upon each other, making it difficult to decipher what is substantial and what is mere reflection.

Stereographs 5, 6, 7, 16, and 27 all employ this tactic but it shines in stereograph 6 (reel

1, image 6, figure 14), and I struggle to decipher if what appears to be the back wall of a storefront window is truly a wall at all, or if it is merely darkened glass. Even after

extended examination of the scene I cannot be sure of the relative opaqueness or translucency of a surface that makes up a third of the image; am I looking through it or am I being shown what is behind me? What is real and what is mere appearance? I ask the same question when viewing stereograph number 16 (reel 3, image 4, figure 15), in which I find myself peering through the front window of what appears to be a large car showroom, as indicated by the presence of a (now) vintage blue Chrysler Cordoba.22 At first it seems like a teal van sits in the interior of the showroom beyond the Chrysler, but after a moment I realize that the van is not there at all and is only a reflection, its semi- transparent image impossibly intersecting with the solid metal body of the Chrysler.

This inability to clearly define what is real and what is mere reflection is exacerbated in stereograph number 5 (reel 1, image 5, figure 16); one of the most deceptive and complex of all of Shore’s stereographs, it contains several perceptual surprises that slowly reveal themselves. First comes the realization that the white lines present on three sides of the frame actually belong to a pane of glass that is quite close to me, but nearly invisible if it weren’t for these lines that I sense (more than can prove) are just in front of me. The defunct storefront window is a complex arrangement of linear elements—the vertical surfaces of walls and windows are cut by diagonal shadows, lines proliferate and cross, and I struggle to make sense of the scene. Navigating the space, I begin to realize that it does not extend as far as I previously thought—the mirror propped against the furthest wall plays a trick on me, making it appear as if the storefront extends further beyond the back wall by reflecting the wall and window in front of it.

22 My notebook entry for this stereograph reads, “Again with the illusions! WHERE are these things? Inside? Outside? Real? Illusion? Physical? Ghostly? Both at the same time.” This inability to position both myself and depicted objects within the scene, physically and spatially, is one of the great tensions created by this work.

My breath is taken from my own lungs when I realize that I can see the faintest impression of Shore’s reflection in the glass—his tousled brown hair, his knuckles highlighted by the sun as he holds the three-eyed camera at his forehead, obscuring his face.23 A barely-visible apparition floating atop the peeling white wall, I struggle place his reflection on the pane directly in front of me where I know it rightly appears. Is it my reflection in the window? This empathic exchange is an uncanny in and out of body, in and out of time and space, experience. Our reflection seems to recede and float on its own within the interior space of the storefront display, approximately halfway between the glass that I am standing in front of and the far wall upon which the mirror rests. A complex maze of mirrors and reflections, an intricate layering of near and far, ethereal and substantial, real and illusion, Shore’s very reflection becomes a metaphor for the complexity and vividly real yet intangible nature of his stereographs.

Logistics of Stereography

The vast majority of photographs are created with single lens cameras and viewed as printed or digital images. As a result, very few people beyond art historians and explorative photographers are familiar with the history of the stereoscopic camera and its resulting stereographs—a medium that uses photographic technology but produces a fundamentally different result. The stereographic camera mimics human perception through its use of dual lenses and can be considered a hybrid between the monocular camera and binocular human vision. The resulting stereoview or stereocard, as well as the way that one views it, is also a hybrid between the traditional, two-dimensional photographic print and the very act of seeing.

23 I call the Stereo Realist a “three-eyed camera” because it appears to have three eyes—the viewfinder is sandwiched between the two lenses. This row of three silver circles with black centers gives the Stereo Realist a unique appearance.

Visual perception is a collaboration between the eyes and the brain—light is funneled through the single lens of the eye, projecting a flat image onto the retinal wall that is converted into nerve impulses and subsequently transmitted through the optic nerves to the brain. The brain merges the monocular images from each eye into a single field in which we perceive depth. In his article published in 1859, Oliver Wendell

Holmes describes, in layman’s terms, the role of the eyes in tandem with the brain in constructing a mental conception of exterior reality that allows for the perception of depth. He writes:

We see something with the second eye which we did not see with the first; in other words, the two eyes see different pictures of the same thing, for the obvious reason that they look from points two or three inches apart…Though, as we have seen, the two eyes look on two different pictures, we perceive but one picture. The two have run together and become blended in a third, which shows us everything we see in each…our two eyes see two somewhat different pictures, which our perception combines to form one picture, representing objects in all their dimensions, and not merely as surfaces.24

The stereograph imitates this process, feeding each eye a slightly different image taken from its respective viewpoint. It inserts the perspectival view directly into the brain that then combines the two. Prior to the stereograph, the pictorial illusion of depth was only viewable within the exterior, sensible environment and was confined to representation through a monocular viewpoint. The stereograph imitates the scientific process of human perception in order to put the illusion directly into the mind of the viewer, rather than on a physical surface that is within the viewer’s perceivable environment.

Because a device is necessary to isolate each image and present it to the respective eye, the intended viewing and subsequent perceptual effect of a stereograph

24 Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” 1859, in Photography in print: Writings from 1816 to the present, ed. Vicki Goldberg (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 105-106.

cannot be recreated in traditional two-dimensional printed format. This very fact limits the dissemination and exhibition of all stereographs. Subsequently, the stereograph acquires an experiential nature beyond that of the traditional photograph, which is by far the most easily replicated and disseminated form of imagery in the history of mankind. It was because of this difficulty inherent in presentation that Shore did not engage in any further exploration of the stereograph or subsequent use of the Stereo Realist camera after this initial body of work was made in 1974. However, despite these difficulties unique to the medium, the stereograph was an incredibly common object in Western culture for over a hundred years.

The History of Stereoscopic Technology

The stereograph is a profound invention in the development of perspective, and yet the West has responded to it with a seeming amnesia. Popularized and commercialized, at the whim of popular taste, it was buried under the weight of an increasingly industry-based consumer society. The stereograph was effectively the first fabricated “3D experience,” and in his book, The Art of Stereography, historian Douglas

Heil calls the stereograph the “progenitor of everything 3D that [has] followed.”25 The stereograph from 1850 onward is the model upon which nearly all subsequent 3D technologies have been based was contingent on four developments that transpired in the mid-1800s: research into the nature of binocular vision, photography itself, the negative- positive process using the wet collodion process in tandem with albumen printing paper, and the invention of the portable, user-friendly stereoscope (particularly the 1859 model designed by Oliver Wendell Holmes) for personal use in the home.

25 Douglas Heil, The Art of Stereography (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2017), 5.

The optic science that led to the development of the stereograph was first researched and demonstrated by British physicist Sir Charles Wheatstone when, in 1838,

Wheatstone presented a paper on “the physiology of vision to the Royal Academy” in

London.26 Although scientists and opticians had been studying the workings of the human eyes for hundreds of years, Wheatstone was the first to recognize, research, and put into writing the mechanics of the human eyes, explaining that the two human eyes, spaced approximately two to three inches apart, receive two slightly different two- dimensional images that the brain then synthesizes into a single field of vision, enabling us to recognize spatial depth.27 Two months later he presented his findings again to the

British Association in Newcastle but also demonstrated, for the first time, his “new stereoscope invention that merged nearly similar graphic line drawings into a single three-dimensional image”28 (figure 17). Because photography had not yet been publicized, Wheatstone’s original stereographic device did not actually involve photographs of any kind, but rather merged two similar line drawings into a 3D image.29

26 Heil, The Art of Stereography, 5. Wheatstone also published his findings in volume 128 of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A as, Charles Wheatstone, “Contributions to the physiology of vision—Part the first. On some remarkable, and hitherto unobserved, phenomena of binocular vision,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 128 (1838): accessed October 28, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1098. According to Wikipedia, the publication is a “fortnightly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the Royal Society” that publishes “original research and review content in a wide range of physical scientific disciplines.” 27 Holmes, “The Stereoscope,” 105–106. In 1859, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote an article that discussed the experience of a stereograph, explained in plain language the way it operated, and made recommendations to the reader on what kinds of stereographs and collections of stereoviews that they should seek to posses. In order to explain this phenomena of a mentally-fabricated third image and the brain’s role in constructing it, Wendell Holmes cites alcohol’s ability to produce double vision: “the eyes are right enough, probably, but the brain is in trouble and does not report their telegraphic messages correctly.” 28 Heil, The Art of Stereography, 5. 29 Harold Layer, “Norman McLaren 3-D images 1944--1946 and correspondence 1974--1983,” Harold Layer Website, accessed October 28, 2018, http://online.sfsu.edu/hl/NormanMcLaren.html. The creation of stereoscopic drawings did not end with Wheatstone’s initial stereoscope—20th century artist Norman McLaren created a number of 3D drawings and paintings. His work has been collected and compiled by Dr. Harold A. Layer, Professor Emeritus at San Francisco State University and can be viewed on Dr. Layer’s website.

However, like so many of the seemingly divine coincidences and cases of parallel thought that occurred throughout the early history of photographic discoveries,

Wheatstone’s work was published just one year before the Daguerreotype process was announced in France.30

The Crucial Combination

The invention of photography was obviously crucial to the stereograph as we know it today. Without the photograph, Wheatstone’s discovery and model would have been limited to line drawings and simple renderings, because while we can easily perceive the different perspectives of our two eyes, and we have learned to create the illusion of three-dimensional space on two-dimensional surfaces, even an artist of the highest technical proficiency could never render by hand a realistic likeness that fully captures the nuances and slight differences between the two perspectives of our eyes. The photograph’s copying tactics make exact likenesses possible, down to the smallest detail.

No other medium can circumscribe the visual world like photography can. The precision of the photographic image is what Wheatstone’s stereograph needed, but some methods were better suited for the stereograph than others, and the stereograph wouldn’t meet its perfect match until twelve years after its initial debut.31 Albumen printing paper was first

30 “An Introduction to Photographic Processes,” New York Public Library, accessed May 31, 2018, https://www.nypl.org/collections/nypl-recommendations/guides/photographic-processes. 31 The photograph has as many options by which to come into existence as it has uses and applications, and from its very start it was a multi-faceted object with a variety of methods available for its creation. According to historian William C. Darrah, The World of Stereographs (Nashville, TN: Land Yacht Press, 1997), 1, “by 1851, barely twelve years after the introduction of photography, there were three major ways by which images could be produced: daguerreotype, calotype and glass-collodion. Both calotype and collodion permitted printing multiple copies.” At the very beginning of his comprehensive look at the history of stereography, Darrah, The World, 1, gives this concise overview of the early chemical processes and technical methods by which photographs were made: “The art of photography dates from the discoveries of [Nicéphore] Niepce, [Louis] Daguerre and [William Henry Fox] Talbot between 1826 and 1837 and publication of methods by Daguerre, [Hippolyte] Bayard and Talbot in 1839. Two very different processes were involved, photosensitized metal and photosensitized paper. The method of Niepce and Daguerre [who utilized copper plates] gained immediate success and overshadowed, for a time, those of

publicized in 1850 when Louise-Désiré Blanquart-Evrard published his findings in

France, and its perfect counterpart, the wet-plate collodion process, was first discovered in March 1851 by Frederick Scott Archer in England. This combination provided the negative-positive process that allowed for the creation of multiple copies on paper surfaces from an ultra-sharp, grainless glass plate negative.32 The wet plate processes not only retained the aesthetic advantages of the daguerreotype—crystalline sharpness—but also achieved the reproducibility of the calotype and talbotype, and thus was the image- making process perfectly suited for Wheatstone’s stereoscopic technology.

Two models of handheld stereoscopes, one invented by Sir David Brewster in

1849 (figure 18) and another by Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1859 (figure 19), were the decisive links between Wheatstone’s findings and photography’s copying abilities.

Without these user-friendly interpretations of Wheatstone’s first stereographic device, stereography might never have taken off; Heil writes that, “Wheatstone’s device was a cumbersome monstrosity—guaranteed to chain 3D to the science lab forever.”33

Hippolyte Bayard and Fox Talbot [who used paper negatives].” Although it is not known who first merged stereoscopic technology with the photograph to create the first photographic-stereograph, it is understood that the first stereographs were daguerreotypes, even though the daguerreotype was not the ideal photographic counterpart for stereoscopic technology. While the daguerreotype, first publicized in 1839 by Louis Daguerre was incredibly sharp and detailed, copies and reproductions of the resulting image were impossible. The daguerreotype’s inability to be reproduced was one of its two inherent disadvantages, the second being that the daguerreotype’s metallic surface reflected light and restricted viewing to specific angles, and its reflective surface quality is a perpetually evident factor at all times. The problems of surface luminosity and the unique image were solved by the simultaneous inventions of Hippolyte Bayard and William Henry Fox Talbot. Both inventors created light-sensitive paper that, when developed and fixed, would result in a paper negative from which multiple positive copies could be produced. Bayard’s prints were called “calotypes” and Talbot patented his invention and named it the “talbotype.” However, in exchange for a decreased exposure time and the ability to make copies, both the calotype and the talbotype sacrificed the sharpness of the daguerreotype, and the talbotype’s process was restricted to the public due to Talbot’s imposition of a patent. While Darrah, The World, 1, grants the paper negative process “a beautiful soft texture seldom achieved by any other process,” the calotype lacked the crystalline sharpness of the daguerreotype. Ultimately, neither the daguerreotype nor the paper negative processes were ideal for use in tandem with the stereograph. 32 Heil, The Art of Stereography, 6. Frederick Scott Archer published A Manual of the Collodion Process in 1852, standardizing the wet plate process. 33 Heil, The Art of Stereography, 6.

Brewster, a Scottish scientist, “unleashed 3D” to the world by “devising a compact stereoscope tailor-made for the parlor,” and further advertised his invention at the Crystal

Palace in London’s Great Exhibition of 1851.34 Its appearance in the Great Exhibition

“created a sensation: overnight, everyone wanted one in their home—along with a stack of stereographs.”35 Brewster’s stereoscope utilized a box design constructed from metal or highly polished wood in which two side doors would be opened to admit light. Two lenses, positioned on the top of the box, allowed the viewer to peer into two adjacent compartments, each of which had a daguerreotype resting on the floor of the box.36 The first manufacturer of Brewster’s lenticular stereoscope, Jules Dubosq, recognized the limitations of this design and added a ground glass base in order to make viewing of translucent paper and glass positive images possible.37

Brewster’s stereoscope dominated the British market until 1875, but Oliver

Wendell Holmes was working on another model that would shift “the center of stereo

34 Ibid, 6. 35 Darrah, The World, 6. 36 Darrah, The World, 2. Brewster-style stereoscopes differ on the design of the photograph-holding chamber. Some diagrams and images show two distinctly separate compartments that house their respective images, while some show a singular interior box in which both photographs (or two photographs printed on one surface) would be placed. 37 Ibid, 2. Thanks to Dubosq’s alteration, Brewster’s stereoscope could now accommodate images on glass, both transparencies and the ambrotype, which has a white image on a black background. Dubosq’s addition of the ground glass in order to allow a backlight to illuminate images on translucent surfaces anticipates 20th century stereoscope designs that would use film or reels, such as the True View stereoscope and the View-Master. It should be noted that the quality of light within the photograph is fundamentally different between positive images on translucent surfaces and those on opaque surfaces. In the former’s case, light enters the eye directly, filtered through the image itself. In the latter’s case, light bounces off the surface of the image and into the eye. While this difference may seem inconsequential, the effect of light streaming through a semi-translucent image endows it with a vibrancy not otherwise attainable. Glass or positive film images are able to attain a level of realism that the stereocard cannot hope to compete with; the illusion perceived when viewing a stereocard through Holmes’ stereoscope is an obvious farce. Shore’s stereographs are on color positive film, and in several cases, most notably in one stereograph in which light streams through an apartment window (stereograph number 21, reel 4, image 3), the light from the stereograph viewer enters the eyes of the viewer in the same manner that it would have entered the lenses of Shore’s Stereo Realist. In many cases, Shore’s stereographs seem to glow as if brought to life by the light that renders them visible.

activity to America, where it remained unchallenged for eighty years.”38 First released in

1859 and constructed with help from Holmes’ friend Joseph L. Bates, the Holmes stereoscope determined the format that stereographs would begin to take—the stereocard.39 Holmes’ stereoscope was lightweight, featuring a viewing hood and an adjustable stereocard holder that would hold a piece of cardboard upon which the two stereographic photographs would be mounted. This is an important shift in technology—

Darrah asserts that “more than 99% of all stereographs [created before 1940] are card- mounted or printed on card,” establishing the stereocard method as the predominant way of creating stereoviews. 40 The effect of light bouncing off of a stereocard is quite different than light entering the eye through a translucent image on glass, and results in a loss of realism as well as the perpetual awareness that one is viewing a printed image.

Because the Holmes stereoscope would become the predominant method of creating and viewing stereographs, the stereograph never achieved its potential levels of realism during its peak years of the late 1860s. Color positive film would not be invented until

1939, by which time the stereograph would have been replaced by a multiplicity of other photographic technologies and products.

Amnesia in Popular Culture

38 Ibid, 2. 39 Ibid, 10. According to Darrah, “more than 99% of all stereographs [created before 1940] are card- mounted or printed on card.” Darrah’s estimation does not consider stereoviews created after 1940, so this figure is entirely inaccurate in consideration of other emerging technologies such as the View-Master. It would be impossible to assign a true percentage to any form of stereoview across the medium’s entire history, as stereoscopic devices were so common that establishing a complete view of how many or what kinds of stereographs and stereoscopes exist in the world would be nearly impossible. Stereographs and stereoscopes have never been treated as “art objects,” and therefore never acquire the documentation necessary to establish trends or provenance. However, the point is that Holmes’ stereograph fundamentally changed and determined the way that stereographs would be made and viewed. 40 Ibid, 10.

Discovered by the chemists, generated and consumed by the masses, advanced by the inventors, archived by historians, debated by scholars, explored by artists, and exploited by corporations, photography is a complex medium. Because photography is inherently technical and scientific, with a multiplicity of uses (many outside the realm of fine art or aesthetics as evidenced above), its inventive and more dedicated users tend to be scientifically inclined and often develop or tweak the medium as a result of a scientific spirit of inquiry. Furthermore, as photography has become an overwhelmingly ubiquitous activity, often tied to recreational or domestic use, a global market has arisen in order to offer consumers increasingly diverse methods of taking, collecting, and sharing photographs. As a result, the history of photography is a dense web of innovations and trends, driven in part by not only the curiosity of photographers and scientists or the aesthetic and conceptual pursuits of artists, but also the demands of and shifts in a global market.

A commercial venture from its inception, the stereograph had competition from every angle and was prone to fluctuating market trends and changing consumer desires.

Even though the stereograph was one of the most popular forms of photographic imagery from its inception to the close of the 19th century, several photographic and non- photographic products began to emerge, as well as cultural and economic developments seemingly unrelated to photography, that would ultimately usurp the stereograph’s place of predominance in society.41 Among these competitors were the carte de visite

(essentially photo trading cards), postcards, global economic instability and depression in the last quarter of the 19th century, cost-saving deference to cheaper methods and a

41 Heil, The Art of Stereography, 10.

resulting decrease in the overall quality of stereographs, and the invention of movies, radio, and television, to name a few.42

With each invention, people changed not only their relationship to photographs but also the ways in which they consumed images and captured and commemorated experiences. Stereographs became just one episode in the quickly-evolving history of photography, and while they stuck around in popular culture throughout the 20th century

(enjoying periodic resurgences in popularity in the 1950s through the invention of new cameras such as the Stereo Realist and in the 1970s thanks to novel viewing devices such as the View-Master), they never regained the monumental appeal that they enjoyed in the late 1800s.43 There are also practical difficulties that have contributed to the stereograph’s downfall, contributing to its absence in photographic art history and theory, and may explain the stereograph’s absence in artists’ oeuvres.

Challenges to Development of a Historiography

The relative inaccessibly of Shore’s stereographs (in comparison to the ease with which one can view many of his other bodies of work) parallels the difficulty that one encounters when researching the history of stereography itself. The historical record of the medium’s use and development that does exist is almost entirely dedicated to the documentation of the corporations that emerged to capitalize upon stereography as a business opportunity. Much can be (and a decent amount has been) written about the individual companies and photographers that produced and sold stereographs, the latter often working under the direction of the former. However, it becomes hard to trace the

42 Heil, The Art of Stereography, 10, 16–17, 24–25. 43 Keith Clatworthy, “View-Master History,” 20th Century Stereo Viewers, accessed October 28, 2018, http://www.viewmaster.co.uk/htm/history.asp. The View-Master was created by William Gruber and Harold Graves in 1938 with the initial intention of being an educational tool for adults, but it gradually evolved into its role as predominantly a source of children’s entertainment.

development of a technology that took on a multiplicity of forms when proliferated by commercial development and used most predominantly by amateurs.44 Only a few very dedicated individuals have made the effort to trace the stereograph’s widely-varied development after the 1920s.45 Furthermore, as previously demonstrated, the stereograph was largely a household object with an intrinsic use value over conceptual value or meaning, placing it somewhere between utilitarian object, commodity, and source of entertainment.

The lack of development of the stereograph as an artistic medium and its resulting absence in the history of art is largely a result of the fact that it did not tag along in the repertoire of photographers who made it their mission to elevate photography to the status of an art. It is this reality—the fact that the stereograph was pursued most adamantly by businessmen and not by artists—that prevented the format from gaining traction as a fine art medium as successfully as other forms of photography, most predominantly the black and white print. Shore’s use of the stereograph is unprecedented amongst artists and art photographers—when I asked him if he, as someone involved in

44 The use of the word “amateur” here is not a negative term. Amateurs are often thought of as people working at a lower skill level than professionals, but in reality the term refers to those that pursue a skill or endeavor on an unpaid basis, not for profit. Amateurs are those that pursue things for the love of them. Amateurs are able to take more risks, pursue content and style without the restraints of a patron or corporation, and are not driven by marketability or salability. They are in the realm of ideas and beauty, not the realm of money or profit. A history of amateur stereographers would very likely uncover a fascinating array of incredible work from people who pursued the medium for no other purpose than exploration and creation itself. 45 There are several scholars and historians who have devoted themselves to this task, although their work and research is, at this point, mostly found on the Internet, as opposed to published in printed format. There are also several Stereographic Societies: The Stereoscopic Society (UK), The Stereoscopic Society of America, the National Stereoscopic Association, The Detroit Stereographic Society, etc., that facilitate community and camaraderie between practitioners of this unusual medium. In short, there are places for stereographers, both amateurs and professionals, to exhibit their stereoviews and operate within a community that supports and facilitates their work. However, the work of these artists and photographers has not yet been incorporated into the larger, scholarly realm of Art or Photo History. Very little attention is paid to these artists within the art market and they receive very little credit or scholarship in comparison to the level of recognition and exhibition that more traditional artistic mediums (painting, sculpture, the photographic print, etc.) enjoy. The pursuit of stereography for artistic purposes has remained underground and unexamined.

Fine Art and Photography, knew of anyone else working with stereographs on a professional and artistic level of consequence, he said that German photographer Thomas

Ruff was the only other artist to work with stereography in the 20th century.46 Blinded by its seemingly trite role in society as merely a source of entertainment and inhibited by viewing constraints, scholars did not discuss it and artists did not call our attention to it. It is a genuine shame that the advocates of a medium that has brought to light some of the most complex issues in contemporary art, culture and philosophy did not recognize stereography as the theoretical and artistic goldmine that it is. However, the medium itself posed a laundry list of constraints and considerations, and the idiosyncrasies that make the medium so fascinating are ultimately what led to its repeated downfalls.

Old Medium, New Problems

Perhaps the reason that stereography is almost never seen while we are barraged by photographs on a daily basis lies simply in the problems that arise from the particular way in which they must be viewed. Because proper viewing requires a stereoscopic device, stereographs suffer from a resulting inability to be easily viewed in print format or on a screen.47 This need for a stereoscope in order to give rise to the illusion of depth

46 Stephen Shore, “A few questions about your stereographs,” e-mail message to author, October 8, 2018. Ruff’s stereographic images were exhibited in a 2009 show entitled “Visual Tactics,” at the Kunsthalle Műcsarnok in Budapest, Hungary. The artist webpage for the exhibition, “Thomas Ruff,” Pillanatgépek, accessed November 8, 2018, http://pillanatgepek.c3.hu/en/kiallitas/muveszek/thomas-ruff/, states, “Thomas Ruff began to investigate the process of stereophotography in 1992, and the first authorised shots date from 1994. Ruff had been led to stereoscopy by his general interest in the conditions of human perception and of image creation in particular. He has reactivated the principle of the stereoscope – invented in Great Britain in 1838/1844 for the creation of 3-D images – but implements it as a self-reflecting viewing apparatus rather than an illusionary machine.” 47 There is, however, a technique for viewing stereographs that have been printed on a single surface or are on a digital screen called the “Cross-eyed Freeview” method. In order for it to work, the two photographs must be printed/positioned in reverse order, so that the right frame is on the left and the left frame is on the right. Viewers can train themselves to cross their eyes so that the left eye sees the correct image (that is on the right) and visa versa. As the eyes cross, the image will go double and a third image will appear in the middle: this is the stereowindow. As the viewer learns to keep this stereowindow in place, they will begin to be able to navigate, with increasing ease, the space within the stereo image while maintaining its focus.

interrupts and prohibits all of the ways in which photographs are normally viewed (as two-dimensional images) and prohibits their mass publication, dissemination or viewing.

There is a certain level of immersion necessary in order to view stereographs—a dedication of concentration, a willingness to step into another world. Viewing a stereograph becomes a singular, relatively private affair, or at least an action that is shared between individuals (“look at this”), and it is one that effectively cuts the viewer off from the visual world around him. The stereograph asks something more of the viewer; when I view stereographs I pay the price of admission much in the same way that

I do when I am deeply absorbed in a good book—I enter another world and let the rest of my sensory perceptions fade away until I inhabit someplace else. This phenomenon gradually reveals itself and grows stronger with time as the eyes learn to navigate the three-dimensional image. A photographic print can take me places, certainly, but it cannot envelop or transport like a stereograph can.

These requirements do not bode well with the most common instances in which photographs are encountered—in advertisements, as digital images, or in print media.

These platforms all operate with profit in mind and as a quick visual interlude, able to be seen and consumed easily with a glance and allowing the viewer to still be at least partially aware of the greater field of phenomena unfolding around him at all times. In his

1977 essay “Looking at Photographs,” Victor Burgin writes:

Although photographs may be shown in art galleries and sold in book form, most photographs are not seen by deliberate choice, they have no special space or time allotted to them, they are apparently (an important qualification) provided free of

Many books discussing or showing stereographs print stereoviews in this manner so that readers who are familiar with the cross-eyed freeview method can view the stereograph with its illusion of space without the use of a stereoscope or stereocard. Although it is not a comfortable, nor an ideal, method for viewing stereographs, it does work and does make it possible to experience the dimensionality of stereographs when they are printed or on screen. It is a useful tool for learning to “read” stereographs without equipment.

charge—photographs offer themselves gratuitously; whereas paintings and films readily present themselves to critical attention as objects, photographs are received rather as an environment.48

Stereographs cannot be marketed as prints or books like traditional photographs can, and therefore are not as lucrative a medium as the traditional photograph, which benefits greatly from its ability to be reproduced in many forms.

Problematic Art Object

Always a capitalist venture, stereographs were often sold in sets—collections of exotic places, boxed sets of vacation destinations for tourists to take home with them, series in which each view contributed to a narrative or overarching theme—and thus were consumed, not treasured.49 Treated with the same casualness and on the same scale as the family snapshot, frequently handled and never framed or placed behind protective glass, the stereograph is further negated by the ritualistic or cautious care reserved for precious or “art” objects. The result of all of these factors is what Walter Benjamin describes as the withering of the “aura” of the work of art.50 When an object that is already inherently reproducible becomes forcefully commoditized and marketed on a mass scale, any semblance of individuality or value derived from uniqueness is demolished.

The challenges encountered in viewing stereographs logically lead to questions of the salability of stereographs, upon which we encounter another set of problems and

48 Victor Burgin, “Looking at Photographs,” in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004), 130. Burgin’s essay was originally published in Screen Education, no. 24, 1977 © The Society for Education in Film and Television. 49 Seriality plays a large roll in most photography today, as the reproducibility of the photograph as well as the shorted time necessary to produce the initial image unsettles the established concept of the importance, weight and uniqueness of a work of art. Photographs are often experienced in groups; rarely are we shown a single photograph, rarely do we make just one. 50 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 23.

pitfalls. One attraction of buying artwork is its perceived value as an art object that communicates the purchaser’s taste and interests, as well as his or her ability to afford and acquire artwork, when displayed. However, like installation art that demands site- specific accommodations or ephemeral objects that require strict preservation considerations, stereographs are not well-suited for display in private or public collections. In the case of a stereograph, the “art-object” itself is no more than either a small stereocard, rarely exceeding the standard four by six inch Holmes stereocard format, or in the case of a Stereo Realist stereocard, a small 4 by 1 5/8 inch mount containing two transparent slides.51 Unlike the traditional photographic image or print, it cannot be printed in a book or admired hanging next to the collector’s other acquisitions in a way that would facilitate proper viewing.52

Just because the stereograph is more difficult to market or sell as an art object, it doesn’t mean that the format is completely resistant to participation in the art market.

There are, of course, ways for artists to make their stereographs available for purchase that enable individual buyers to own artist-produced stereographs. For example, Shore’s publication of New York, New York in View-Master format allows 400 people to obtain a copy of the stereoviews for viewing at his or her leisure while all 30 of the actual, physical stereo mounts containing the positive film images remain in Shore’s personal collection. However, this accessibility to the work does not come without a noticeable decrease in detail due to the extreme decrease in the size of each image—Shore’s original

51 “Thorpe Digital Stereoview Standard,” The Skep 3D Page, accessed October 28, 2018, http://www.skep.com/3D/specifications.htm. 52 The stereograph’s anti-art object quality could also be its greatest strength: it is a more experiential medium, and therefore may be resistant to the destructive effects of a capitalist art market that thrives on sensationalism and cult value. As our culture moves increasingly towards valuing experiences over objects, the stereograph is a perfect medium that provides the former and denies fetishization of the latter.

23 by 21 mm slides are shrunk to a mere 11.5 by 10 mm to fit the View-Master reel (a

75% decrease in size). While the original slides themselves are positively crystalline, with incredible sharpness and detail, when they are downsized to fit on a View-Master reel they lose detail as a result of being so heavily condensed.

These aspects would not be noticeable to the average viewer who has never spent time with the original stereoviews, but if the two were compared side by side the View-

Master copy would appear an obvious downgrade. The View-Master device itself also seems to put a distance between the viewer and the stereo image—the scene feels further away than when viewing the full size slides, and as a result it is slightly more difficult to enter the space depicted; the mind must work harder to truly inhabit the illusion.

However, this additional effort on the part of the viewer pays off, and the more time spent with each image the greater and more convincing the illusion of depth. The View-Master format is not ideal for Shore’s highly detailed stereoviews, but concessions must be made in order to make them available to the public. According to Shore, the View-Master format was “the only viable mechanism that could be sold in quantity,” attesting to the difficulty that artists still encounter in making, publishing and selling stereographs. Still, the increase in accessibility certainly makes up for the decrease in quality, and the very fact that I can reference Shore’s stereographs while writing about them is an invaluable resource.53

53 I am grateful to Stephen Shore not only for making New York, New York available to the public through its publication in View-Master format, but also for notifying me of its impending release early on in my research. Not many art historians get to own the work that they write about, or experience it at their leisure. Like something out of my wildest dreams, I have had the opportunity to do both and the ability to spend time with the work in the midst of writing about it has made all the difference in the formation and development of this thesis.

Even if artists and photographers did pursue stereography more fervently, stereographs invariably encounter difficulties when exhibited.54 In his seminal text, The

Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Walter Benjamin makes the case that in modern times, an artwork’s appeal and value is directly tied to and indeed determined by its ability to be exhibited. Benjamin writes:

Just as the work of art in prehistoric times, through the exclusive emphasis placed on its cult value, became first and foremost an instrument of magic which only later came to be recognized as a work of art, so today, through the exclusive emphasis placed on its exhibition value, the work of art becomes a construct…with quite new functions. Among these, the one we are conscious of— the artistic function—may subsequently be seen as incidental.55

Unless there are multiple stereoscopes displaying identical images, each stereographic image can only be viewed by one person at a time; there is no potential for collective perception of the stereoview. Viewing a stereograph becomes a private affair, one that effectively cuts the viewer off from the visual world around him, an act of isolation that is not required by other, more traditional artistic mediums that are discreet objects placed within the surrounding environment, on display for all present to view.

Furthermore, the logistics of exhibiting stereographs in a gallery or museum setting (the venues in which photographs are formally shown to the community and the institutions that act as intermediaries between artists and the public) extend far beyond typical concerns of where to position art objects within the galleries or how high to hang work on the wall. The gallery or museum must obtain stereoscopic viewing devices that visitors and patrons can utilize without risk of theft of either the stereoscope or the

54 Art has been expanding to be conducive to work that is temporal, conceptual and unconventional. In response, galleries and museums have had to become increasingly creative in order to find ways to display artworks made of unusual mediums that pose unique exhibition challenges. The stereograph, while it comes with its own particular set of exhibition difficulties, does not pose insurmountable challenges, but they do add up to be a significant number of additional considerations for the artist that may be enough to deter most photographers. 55 Benjamin, “The Work,” 25.

individual stereoviews. Therefore, either multiple stereoscopes (that are attached to a surface to prevent theft) with fixed, immoveable stereoviews (resulting in one stereoscope for each stereoscopic image) are necessary or a “cabinet viewer” (Figures 20 and 21; a stationary box containing multiple stereocards that can be cycled through by rotation of a knob or push of a button located on the exterior) of some kind is required.

Shore himself encountered these complications when initially exhibiting New York, New

York at Light Gallery in 1975, although he was able to overcome them by borrowing “a metal viewing box that was made by Realist as a camera store display of their product” from “an editor at Fortune Magazine who had one and was willing to loan it to [him] for the show.”56 However, this stereoscope was not commercially available and Shore “never came across another device like this one.”57 It was this difficulty of exhibition that prevented Shore from pursuing stereography further.58

Despite their exhibition challenges, the popularity of making stereo images is undeniable: From its invention in 1947 to its discontinuation in 1972, the David White

Company sold approximately 250,000 Stereo Realist cameras.59 It is entirely possible,

56 Stephen Shore, “1974 Stereographs,” e-mail message to author. Shore wrote: “When I showed them at Light Gallery, I used a metal viewing box that was made by Realist as a camera store display of their product. It was not commercially available. I met an editor at Fortune Magazine who had one and was willing to loan it to me for the show. As I recall, it held 12 or 15 slides. I never came across another device like this one. I didn’t pursue this work because of the difficulty of presenting it.” 57 Stephen Shore, “1974 Stereographs,” e-mail message to author. 58 It is also the logical choice for an artist or photographer whose work contributes to their livelihood to create photographs/images that translate easily into saleable and displayable objects such as books and prints. Art for art’s sake is admirable but does not pay the bills, so to speak. Shore’s work translates particularly well into these two formats—his illustrious prints grace the walls of numerous museums, galleries and private collections while his work, particularly Uncommon Places, has been printed in book format several times. Furthermore, Shore’s photographs are featured in many books and exhibitions centered around a common theme and not specific to Shore himself, offering additional sources of exposure and revenue. It fundamentally does not make sense, from an economic standpoint, to pursue stereography as a photographer unless a commercial operation mirroring the marketing tactics and goals of the late 19th and early 20th century are employed, in which case the end product would be inherently commercial. 59 Wisconsin Historical Society, “Stereo Realist 3-D Camera,” Wisconsin Historical Society, last modified September 27, 2007, accessed October 29, 2018, https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS2670. The Wisconsin Historical Society details many

probable even, that many unknown artists or photographers worked with stereography extensively but never gained recognition in their lifetimes (or their work was known only, perhaps, on a local level) and thus have gone unnoticed or undocumented.60 As a result, stereographs and those who worked with them do not have as prominent a place in the already-overflowing histories of Art and Photography as photographers who produced the more traditional silver gelatin or chromogenic prints.61 Fortunately, the range and scope of art history is continually expanding and the discipline’s self-awareness of its own deficiencies is reflected in the present movement toward the inclusion of previously neglected demographics and mediums.

Potential Solutions

One advance that may make stereographs easier to exhibit is the advent and development of virtual reality headsets. The first head-mounted virtual reality device was the Telesphere Mask, patented in 1960 by cinematographer Morton Heilig.62 Anyone can obtain a VR headset that utilizes a smartphone to display stereo imagery or video for $10 on Amazon.com.63 Artist and photographer, Craig Goldwyn, writes: “At the dawn of the

celebrities and public figures who promoted and worked with the Stereo Realist camera, including John Wayne, Doris Day and Dwight D. Eisenhower. 60 Harold A. Layer, “Stereoscopy: An Analysis of Its History and Its Import to Education and the Communication Process” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1970), 82–86. Layer gives a well-written and concise history of the Stereo Realist camera, explaining that it was adopted as the standard and paved “the way for a wide range of compatible equipment to be available in the early 1950’s.” This standardization, the ease of working with 35mm color film, and the availability of businesses who would develop and mount slides made stereography easier than ever before for amateur/semi-professional stereographers. However, the popularity of stereography within photography remained marginal and continued to taper off in by late 1950s. By 1960, only 5–7% of the color slide film that Kodak processed was stereo. Layer cites the stereograph’s demand of individual viewing as the 35mm stereo image’s demise. 61 Stereographs have been collected, archived, and exhibited by museums, and, to some extent, have been studied and documented by historians, but not as distinct “art objects,” or as images with individual, artistic or philosophical meaning or value. 62 Virtual Reality Society, “History of Virtual Reality,” Virtual Reality Society, accessed September 27, 2018, https://www.vrs.org.uk/virtual-reality/history.html. 63 As part of primary research for this thesis, I bought a Stereo Realist camera on eBay and created my own stereographic photographs. I scanned the color positive film images, combined them into a digital stereocard on Photoshop, uploaded it to my phone and viewed the stereo image with this VR headset

new millennium, the craft of stereography is evolving into an art form.”64 Developing technology that would allow easier access to stereo images may provide the medium with the momentum needed to bring it back into the public and artistic sphere. Walter

Benjamin writes:

It has always been one of the primary tasks of art to create a demand whose hour of full satisfaction has not yet come. The history of every art form has critical periods in which the particular form strains after effects which can be easily achieved only with a changed technical standard—that is to say, in a new art form. The excesses and crudities of art which thus result, particularly in periods of so-called decadence, actually emerge from the core of its richest historical energies.65

Considering the growing market of VR technology, the possibilities for this alternative form of photography are endless, although they will still require additional considerations by artists and exhibitionists that traditional photography does not necessitate.

The difficulties encountered in publishing, selling and exhibiting stereographs as art objects do not, however, illustrate the fundamental difference between the monocular photograph and the binocular stereograph, which is found in the different methods by which they create the illusion of spatial depth and the different levels of realism that each is able to attain. When viewed through the lens of history and philosophy, the stereograph becomes a massively consequential medium, surmounting the limitations of two- dimensional media in its depiction of three-dimensional depth.

The Evolution of Perspective

Art has had a myriad of functions throughout human history, one of them being the re-creation and re-presentation of the visual world in tangible form. In his essay, designed to hold an iPhone: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N97ZWDN/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 64 Craig Goldwyn, “Welcome to Stereographer.com, an introduction to stereo photography, 3D photography, and a gallery of 3D photographic artists,” Stereographer.com, accessed October 28, 2018, https://stereographer.com. 65 Benjamin, “The Work,” 38.

“Convergence of Art, Science and Technology?,” new media artist Jeffrey Shaw expounds upon this topic, writing:

The activity [of] both art and science has always been the interpretation and recreation of reality. It is an exercise of the human imagination, creating virtual realities which embody tentative structures of meaning. The world appears to us in the light of these fictions that we project onto its surface and art arbitrates this discourse between reality and illusion. The traditional activity of art has been the representation of reality—the manipulation of materials to create tangible mirrors of our experience and desire.66

The desire to create a visible abstraction of reality on a physical surface that references our embodied experience of the external world as human beings is made evident from the earliest cave paintings depicting herds of wild animals. Typically, images of reality also serve additional purposes, carrying meaning and communicating ideas, but at their surface reading they are re-presentations of our visible world.

In his essential text, Perspective as Symbolic Form, art historian Erwin Panofsky makes the case that by studying the development of perspective as an artistic style that mirrors the collective consciousness and evolution of the culture within which it was employed, much can be learned about the way that said culture conceived of its physical world, as well as how each culture expected its art to reflect the exterior world of three dimensions. Panofsky writes that perspective

…is surely a factor of style. Indeed, it may be characterized as (to extend Ernst Cassierer’s felicitous term to the history of art) one of those “symbolic forms” in which “spiritual meaning is attached to a concrete, material sign and intrinsically given to this sign.” This is why it is essential to ask of artistic periods and regions not only whether they have perspective, but also which perspective they have.67

66 Jeffrey Shaw, “Convergence of Art, Science and Technology?,” in Art @ Science, ed. Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau (Austria: Springer-Verlag, 1998), 162. 67 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1991), 40–41.

The way in which artists depict space, and the technology through which depict the physical world, is a key to understanding how people viewed their world and translated their perceptions.

The perspective of a specific time period and location is a reflection of the cognitive and psychological filters through which a particular people perceived not only their sensible world but also what within their world it was that they endowed with meaning and importance. In his book Art and Science, Dolf Rieser, an artist who was trained in biology, argues:

Human perception depends on a complex of cultural and psychological factors. Investigations into the evolution of visual perception show that the history of art forms is closely linked with human behaviour patterns, which in turn give rise to perceptual behaviour. Within each cultural period similar kinds of changes have taken place over long periods of development. The process of “seeing” in itself has presumably remained the same; what has changed is the interpretation and rendering of the seen images. Just as one can speak now of a historical evolution of perception because new ways of seeing are conditioned by the historical periods which produced them, so the way in which space is conceived is a historical phenomenon. Francastel puts it as follows: “the conception of space is an expression of a specific type of relation between man and his environment.” Each society developed its own artistic conceptions, which influenced all persons living within that particular historical period.68

By analyzing artists’ chosen methods and the techniques by which they represented the physical world of three-dimensionality throughout the greater narrative of art history, we can trace the evolution of perspective from antiquity to the stereograph.

According to Panofsky, works of art utilize perspective when “the material surface upon which the individual figures or objects are drawn or painted or carved is thus negated, and instead reinterpreted as a mere ‘picture plane.’ Upon this picture plane is projected the spatial continuum which is seen through it.”69 The picture plane becomes

68 Dolf Rieser, Art and Science (London: Studio Vista/Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1972), 39–40. 69 Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic, 27.

a “window” through which the viewer perceives what appears to be a selected and framed portion of the visual world. Artist-scientist Joe Davis traces this ability to project a spatial continuum on a two-dimensional surface to the Ionian Greek philosopher, Pythagoras’ (c.

570–c. 495) discovery of the tetractys, the number ten in triangular form that contains a the illusion of a three-dimensional cube (figure 22). According to Davis, Pythagoras drew the tetractys “with pebbles on the earth,” and when he realized that he could project or pull a three-dimensional object from a two-dimensional surface “he felt this was incredibly mystical.”70 Pythagoras realized that this illusion of depth was not on the picture’s surface, but in the mind. This is the key to perspective: the illusion is not on the physical surface of the painting, drawing or photograph, but inside the viewer’s mind, and it is the unique way that the stereograph accomplishes this feat that makes it such a compelling pinnacle of achievement. The ability to project a third dimension into the mind of the viewer by the mathematically ordered image on a two-dimensional surface plane as discovered by Pythagoras was abandoned throughout the Medieval period until

Brunelleschi began to apply it in his work it in the fifteenth century.71

Both Hellenistic and Medieval artists developed specific conceptions of space, as well as its relation to objects, but neither were “expressed in terms of a fixed ‘module,’ or organized according to a scientific and mathematic conception of the exterior world.”72

As a result, artists predating the Renaissance are often conceived of as unable to represent space “realistically.” However, the corporeal focus of Greco-Roman art and the

70 Joe Davis, “BALTAN Sessions: JOE DAVIS: THE MAD SCIENTIST OF MIT? - Part 1,” lecture, November 4, 2012, video file, 1:23:01, YouTube, posted by OpenWebcast, November 5, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5bYtNAFoAY. 71 Naomi Blumberg, “Linear Perspective,” Encyclopædia Britannica, accessed October 28, 2018, https://www.britannica.com/art/linear-perspective. 72 Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic, 41.

disintegration of exterior and interior spaces of Medieval art were conscious and intentional choices by artists.73 Space was conceptualized not as “something that could embrace and dissolve the opposition between bodies and nonbodies, but only that which remains…between the bodies,” but portrayed as a homogenous, “immeasurable,” and

“dimensionless” field throughout the entirety of the Hellenistic and Medieval periods until an outside force provided enough pressure to require a shift in method. That exterior pressure would come from a widespread and rapidly shifting conception of the world that would fuel the Renaissance.

The development of linear perspective in the Renaissance was both a rejection of

Medieval methods of representation as well as a response to an increasingly scientifically-oriented and intellectually-driven society. Shaw argues that mathematically- based perspective within painting reemerged during the Renaissance as a response to and in competition with architecture, which founded itself on a scientific method.74 As architecture became a dominant art form, one that correlated with an increasingly empirical view of the world, “visual art was forced to find a scientific method for the construction of an image” in order to remain relevant. Shaw writes that if visual art had remained unscientific

painting would have lost the battle and confirmed the hegemony of architecture. To be taken seriously also the visual arts had to come up with a scientific method, with a methodological foundation. This method, this scientific construction of the image was the central perspective, the re-presentation of three-dimensional space on the two-dimensional plane of an image.75

Linear perspective allowed artists to represent the world with immense accuracy and introduced a level of realism to visual art that had previously been inconceivable.

73 Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic, 48. 74 Shaw, “Convergence of Art,” 170. 75 Shaw, “Convergence of Art,” 170.

Codified through the work of architect and writer Leon Battista Alberti in his text Della

Pittura (1435), linear perspective swept through the Western world, adopting the nuances and style of each culture that it was used in. Linear perspective actually transformed the way that we view the world, bringing to light a decidedly phenomenological consequence—the rise of a roving monocular viewpoint, as the viewer became a single transcendent eye, placed in many points of view throughout time and space.

Photography Changes Everything

Applying the mathematical concepts utilized in architecture to visual art was not without its somewhat unintended effects. Panofsky states:

Not only did [linear perspective] elevate art to a “science” (and for the Renaissance that was an elevation): the subjective visual impression was indeed so far rationalized that this very impression could itself become the foundation for a solidly grounded and yet, in an entirely modern sense, “infinite” experiential world…The result was a translation of psychophysiological space into mathematical space; in other words, an objectification of the subjective.76

Perspective provided a method by which to translate one’s subjective viewpoint into an object viewable by others—precisely what Shore’s stereographs accomplish. The copying capabilities of the photograph compounded and expanded the above effects to a degree that is, in many ways, not yet fully understood by scholars and historians. The photograph intensifies Panofsky’s modern, infinite experiential world by “aestheticizing reality,” and promoting two specific attitudes: “there is nothing that should not be seen”

76 Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic, 66. The word “objectification” takes on a dual meaning here: through perspective, subjective perception is translated into an object: a painting, photograph, drawing, etc. Additionally, through its transformation into an object that utilizes perspective, an interpretation of subjective experience is brought into the exterior world, and thus subjective perspective is made objective and can be seen by others. Husserl would prefer the term “an intersubjectification of the subjective”— bringing subjective experience into the intersubjective world where it can be experience by other subjective beings.

and “there is nothing that should not be recorded.” 77 Furthermore, the photographic image, “because of its dependence on the camera obscura as a tool, is mechanically locked to the dictates of perspective and single-point projection for its expression of space,” and thus mechanically records the visual world that artists had long been tasked with recreating (with a level of precision and accuracy heretofore unimaginable).78 This changed the course of history and redefined the role of the artist within society; Dr.

Harold Layer argues that, “the hold on the artist of the a priori laws of perspective was finally broken, ironically, by the quintessence perspective image, the photograph— ironically, because the photograph obeyed the laws of perspective blindly, automatically, and perfectly.”79

Not only did photography release the other visual art forms from the demand for visual records and pictorial representation of the world, but it also allowed people to record with incredible precision what they encountered in their own subjective visual experience with ever increasing realism and accuracy. While imitative of our visual experience of the world to a degree previously unattainable by any of the established mediums of image making, the photograph was still unable to overcome the inherent limitations of two-dimensional representation. In essence, regardless of its unparalleled realism, the photographic image still required the adoption of a monocular viewpoint, which is inherently an abstraction of the way we see.

The Deceptive Monocular Viewpoint

77 Sontag, On Photography, 176. Sontag also writes that the “camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.” (57) 78 Harold A. Layer, “Stereoscopy: Where Did It Come From? Where Will It Lead?,” Harold Layer Website, accessed October 28, 2018, http://online.sfsu.edu/hl/stereo.html. 79 Layer, “Stereoscopy: Where,” Harold Layer Website.

Although a cunning reproduction, one that is technically “accurate” according to mathematical standards, the monocular viewpoint must make several concessions in its reproduction of reality. Panofsky explains these alterations, explaining that

In order to guarantee a fully rational—that is, infinite, unchanging and homogenous—space, this “central perspective” makes two tacit but essential assumptions: first, that we see with a single and immobile eye, and second, that the planar cross section of the visual pyramid can pass for an adequate reproduction of our optical image. In fact these two premises are rather bold abstractions from reality, if by “reality’ we mean the actual subjective optical impression. For the structure of an infinite, unchanging and homogenous space— in short, a purely mathematical space—is quite unlike the structure of psychophysiological space…80

These two factors are bold abstractions of our embodied perception of the world, yet we have been conditioned to ignore these allowances in exchange for the ability to represent the world at all. So accustomed are we to interpreting two-dimensional images as a spatial continuum that we rarely realize the fundamental problem with this required monocular viewpoint: that while it simulates depth, it is not able to actually capture it and thus sacrifices the experience of the thing it imitates. In his important text, The Rhetoric of Perspective, art historian Hanneke Grootenboer writes that

Contrary to binocular vision, depth disappears from perception in monocular vision. Merleau-Ponty has pointed out the binocular perception is not constructed by means of two monocular perceptions surmounted but is instead of an entirely different order. Therefore, the primal scene of depth’s visualization within the two-dimensional plane of a painting may be of a different order than regular perception, having been enabled only at the expense of the third dimension itself.81

The monocular viewpoint required to translate three-dimensional space onto a two- dimensional surface actually results in the loss of the third-dimension that it is trying to imitate. Grootenboer goes on to say that

80 Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic, 28–30. 81 Hanneke Grootenboer, The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth-century Dutch Still-life Painting (London, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 53.

Since its discovery, perspective has been used to create the illusion of depth and has carried within it a secret that has never really been disclosed. Perspective’s secret is that it never added a dimension to painting, as we are inclined to think, but removed one while persuading us to believe, through the illusion of depth, that an addition had taken place…Perspective is therefore fundamentally paradoxical because it makes us believe that it added a dimension to painting while the flat image of the real that it produces actually attests to the removal of depth.82

For thousands of years, artists had been struggling to overcome the inherent limitations of two-dimensional representational media in the portrayal of depth, developing perspectival methods and devices to create increasingly convincing illusions.83 The genius of the stereograph is its utilization of the science of the binocular perspective in order to mimic the presence of the third-dimension, making the stereograph a profound development in the evolution of perspective because it “resolv[es] the illusionistic impasse faced by photography and the other pictorial arts.”84

The Stereograph as Liberator

Dr. Harold A. Layer, Professor Emeritus at San Francisco State University, was the first to propose the theoretical and historical significance of the stereograph and argued for the recognition of its importance in his 1979 essay, Stereoscopy: Where Did It

Come From? Where Will It Lead?85 His work presented an original idea: the stereograph

82 Grootenboer, The Rhetoric, 94. 83 This struggle has hardly been overcome, even by the stereograph, and is still very much in existence. We grasp at permanence through so many of our activities aimed at preservation or representation. Perhaps it is a refusal to accept the impermanence of all things—a fight against death, against the unrelenting passage of time. The photograph is certainly a revolt against our linear experience of time; Roland Barthes discusses this extensively in Camera Lucida (1980). 84 Layer, “Stereoscopy: Where,” Harold Layer Website. The stereograph cannot restore the third-dimension because it, by its very nature, is still comprised of two two-dimensional images, and three-dimensional space can only be experienced in embodied form. 85 Layer, “Stereoscopy: Where,” Harold Layer Website. The essay was published originally in the photography publication Exposure Magazine’s vol.17, no. 3, 1979 (Fall) issue, pages 34–48. Layer presented the essay as “The Binocular Image—Its Evolving Significance for Photography” at the 1979 National Conference of the Society for Photographic Education in Fort Worth, Texas. The essay’s content is an expansion of Layer’s research into stereography for his 1970 dissertation, written for Indiana University and entitled Stereoscopy: An Analysis of its History and its Import to Education and the Communication Process. Although Layer was mainly concerned with the stereograph’s potential for

was the first medium that was able to overcome the inherent limitations of two- dimensional media in the portrayal of three-dimensional space. In the essay, derived from his doctoral dissertation, Layer advocates for the importance of the stereograph as a pivotal moment in the development of visual art. He writes:

Stereoscopic photography allows the construction or reproduction of real spaces pictorially without the limitations of a flat picture surface. What I mean by “real” is that the reconstructed image exists only in the brain of the viewer, not in the two drawings or photographs that serve only as stencils for the binocular image.86

Just as our perception of the visible world is a mentally fabricated field of appearances, so the stereographic image is located not on the stereocard or slide, but entirely in the mind of the viewer. Both methods of representation of the world, the single-point perspectival image and the binocularly-produced stereograph, project the illusion of space into the viewer’s mind, but the stereograph achieves this to another degree by imitating the optic science that enables us to see in the first place.87 Layer asserts that stereoscopy freed the picturing process from two dimensions “for the first time since the artist began drawing on walls,” allowing the artist to reach into the consciousness of the viewer in a revolutionary and previously inconceivable way. The stereographic image’s gratuitous intrusion into the consciousness of the viewer is one of the most astonishing aspects of the medium, as well as its point of intersection with the philosophical study of consciousness itself—Phenomenology.

application in educational settings in his dissertation, he provides an excellent history of the medium as well as a concise and much-needed view of the development of the stereograph after 1920, as well as some key information on the development of the 35mm color positive stereoview format (the same that Shore was working in). 86 Ibid. 87 To reiterate, the stereograph is created or composed of two monocular photographs viewed separately but simultaneously and thus is dependent on two flat photographs. The two photographs that constitute a stereograph both translate the three-dimensional visual world onto a single plane in this way, albeit from slightly different angles. In this sense, a stereographic camera does not actually produce a three- dimensional image, rather it produces two two-dimensional images that are viewed in a specific way in order to create the illusion of a three-dimensional image.

Art & Phenomenology

In his essay “Hegel and the Phenomenology of Art,” Dr. David Ciavatta asks if there are certain objects that initiate or prompt reflection “back onto the workings of experience itself,” things that compel us to “engage in a suspension of our break from our natural attitude toward things, so as to become alive, instead, to some of the distinctive features of experiential life itself.”88 In his search for these objects and experiences with objects that “embark on the path of phenomenology,” Ciavatta determines that pictorial representation is a dead end because of our perpetual awareness of the picture plane, its externality to our perceiving bodies, and the falsity of the monocular viewpoint. He fails to consider, however, the phenomenological consequences of a pictorial art that transcends all three of these limitations. He therefore misses the stereograph as a form of visual art that manifests many of phenomenology’s fundamental theories and, when experienced, immediately gives rise to phenomenological self-reflection through aesthetic experience.

Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph, John Russon, argues that when an artwork seeks to recreate the visual environment and thus “portrays ‘the real world,’ in so doing it equally portrays what is necessarily an experience, a perspective.”89

Russon uses Frederic Edwin Church’s painting, Heart of the Andes (1859), as an example, stating that the painting “uses oil paint and canvas to make visible to us our own perspective: in witnessing this work, we see what it is like for us to see. The work thus gives a “portrait” of the (an) act of experiencing, and, in seeing what the painting

88 David Ciavatta, “Hegel and the Phenomenology of Art,” in Phenomenology and the Arts, by Peter R. Costello and Licia Carlson (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 298. 89 John Russon, “Phenomenological Description and Artistic Expression,” in Phenomenology and the Arts, ed. Licia Carlson and Peter R. Costello (Lexington Books, 2016), 12.

shows us, we are enabled to see into the nature of our own experiencing.”90 Depictive art is not only a systemization of pictorial space, a way of rationalizing the visible world, but also a method by which we can become cognizant of our own perceptual faculties, leading us to self-reflect on the act of perception itself. Russon explains the ability of the perspectival viewpoint to compel the viewer become aware of his own perceptual experience, writing that

Engaging with the artwork involves our being “pulled up,” so to speak, to the “vision” that it makes available, and through our experience of it we thus become educated into a new ability to see, a new capacity to apprehend the fact and form of our own experience. Our very ability to reflect on our experience—to see our act of experiencing as an act of experiencing—depends on our undergoing a perceptual revolution, and it is the fundamental character of artworks that they precisely provide us such revolutionizing apertures on our experience.91

To be engaged with an artwork that promotes reflection on the very workings of perception itself is to be involved in a self-reflexive study of Phenomenology.

Phenomenology, established in the early 20th century by philosophers Edmund

Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is defined as:

the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view...Literally, phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience.92

Already, photography is an excellent medium for an artistic exploration of the theories and ideas posed by phenomenologists because of its unique ability to capture and fix the appearance of the visible world. As a discipline, phenomenology is as diverse and complex as the men who founded the school of thought, and each philosopher challenged

90 Russon, “Phenomenological Description,” 12. 91 Ibid, 21. 92 Stanford University, “Phenomenology,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, last modified December 16, 2013, accessed May 31, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/.

and expanded the ideas of his predecessors. In his book, The Spell of the Sensuous, author

David Abrams gives an excellent definition of the developing field of Phenomenology:

Phenomenology, as [Husserl] articulated it in the early 1900s, would turn towards “the things themselves,” toward the world as it is experienced in its felt immediacy. Unlike the mathematics-based sciences, phenomenology would seek not to explain the world, but to describe as closely as possible the way the world makes itself evident to awareness, the way things first arise in our direct sensorial experience.93

New York, New York imitates how we perceive the world as beings with binocular vision, and function as an artwork that animates us and “help[s] to suspend our objectivist tendencies,” making us “alive—in an immediate, aesthetic experience, rather than through express intellectual reflection—to some of the most basic features of experience itself.”94

The Stereograph as Phenomenological Medium

The phenomenological reflection incited by the experience of New York, New

York and a subsequent phenomenological analysis of the work illustrates the capacities of the stereograph as a phenomenological medium, pointing to three areas in which the stereograph connects explicitly to Phenomenology: first, the stereograph provides the sensation of embodied perception of intersubjective phenomena through careful imitation of visual perception, but denies further participation, creating a split between external worlds. Second, the stereographic image aestheticizes “associative empathy,” making the viewer feel as though she or he can ‘switch’ viewpoints with others, gaining insight into a subjective experience different from his own. Third, the stereograph is a manifestation of

“subjectivity’s drive towards an appropriate self-image,” an endeavor which German

93 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 2nd ed. (Vintage Books, 2017), 35. 94 Ciavatta, “Hegel and the Phenomenology,” 298.

philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel viewed as intrinsic to art, and creates a visual portrait of subjectivity itself.95

An analysis of these theoretical facets of the stereograph has yet to be undertaken in contemporary scholarship and should begin with a definition of intersubjectivity.

Rethinking Descartes’ split between subjective and objective reality, Husserl proposed that this distinction could be “reframed as a contrast within the subjective field of experience itself—as the felt contrast between subjective and intersubjective phenomena.”96 According to Husserl, the “pure, ‘objective reality’ commonly assumed by modern science” was actually an inaccurate “theoretical construction, an unwarranted idealization of intersubjective experience.”97 Intersubjectivity fashions a world in which all sensing beings are coping with communally experienced external objects and scenarios simultaneously and independently, and each viewpoint is one outlet of subjective experience amongst many. Abrams sums up Husserl’s ideas, stating that

The “real world” in which we find ourselves, then—the very world our sciences strive to fathom—is not a sheer “object,”…but is rather an intertwined matrix of sensations and perceptions, a collective field of experience lived through from many different angles. The mutual inscription of others in my experience, and (as I must assume) of myself in their experiences, effects the interweaving of our individual phenomenal fields into a single, ever-shifting fabric, a single phenomenal world or “reality.”98

Husserl pursued the idea of intersubjectivity in order to combat accusations that his theories were entirely solipsistic, and this led him, according to author David Abrams

[to] implicate the body—one’s own as well as that of the other—as a singularly important structure within the phenomenal field. The body is that mysterious and multifaceted phenomenon that seems always to accompany one’s awareness, and

95 Ciavatta, “Hegel and the Phenomenology,” 301. 96 Abrams, The Spell, 38. 97 Abrams, The Spell, 38. 98 Ibid, 39.

indeed to be the very location of one’s awareness within the field of appearances.99

The stereograph brings to light an important issue: where am I when the location of my awareness, when my dominant perceptions, no longer coincide with the location of my body in the external world? A stereograph provides what appears to be an entrance into the intersubjective world through careful imitation of visual perception but denies further participation, creating a schism between my perceptions and my reality, placing me in a position of unresolvable tension.

This tension stems from the basic, intuitive knowledge that I have my own subjective experience of the intersubjective world and I experience this external world visually, through binocular vision. According to my lived experience, my binocular vision is facilitated through and requires a body, which is my guide within the phenomenal world. When viewing stereographs that are particularly vivid (such as

Shore’s), I feel that since I am adopting what appears to be a binocular viewpoint, strikingly similar to the one that I experience every time I open my eyes, my imagination

(quite logically, actually) desires that I have a body to accompany this set of two eyes. I am well aware of my inability to attain access to the physical center of experience that the stereograph seems to suggest exists, yet I maintain the impression of gaining entry to another center of experience.

The stereograph reveals something analogous to an opportunity to enter the multiplicity of worlds and moments continually transpiring through the perceptions of conscious beings. I feel as though I am able to transcend my body’s limitations as a finite perceptual being whose perceptions both begin in and are inseparable from my body’s

99 Ibid, 37.

location in space and time and literally be somewhere else, inhabiting another center of perceptual experience. The stereograph gives the impression of acquiring a new, distinctly human viewpoint, of adopting a different embodied identity, of being transplanted to a new locale of subjective experience. These three-dimensional images feel real, and if the viewer allows the art to work across time, committing to and engaging with the immersive visual experience, the work becomes teleportative.100 The stereograph operates as a visual, artistic embodiment of Husserl’s theories about the subjective experiences of others, making it feel as though we can ‘switch points of view’ with others, gaining insight into a subjective experience other than our own and aestheticizing “associative empathy.”

According to Abrams, it is by this associative empathy that “the embodied subject comes to recognize these other bodies as other centers of experience, other subjects.”101 I notice that the person next to me also has a body and two eyes and that he responds to the intersubjective external world in ways similar to me; therefore I must deduce that he is a center of perceptual experience as I am. Yet I cannot trade places with him to find out for sure, because “while one’s own body is experienced, as it were only from within, these other bodies are experienced from outside,” and I cannot have access to any perceptual

100 Light plays a large roll in the life of these stereographs. The light in Shore’s stereographs positively pulsates; warmth emanates from the west-facing brick walls of the buildings in the background of stereograph number 14 (reel 3, image 2), my senses know that light, how it feels. I believe that a backlit image is an absolute requirement to attaining a believable level of realism in the stereographic image. This has to do mainly with the action of light and how it enters the viewer’s eye. In the case of a stereocard, light bounces off a printed image into the eye of the viewer and the viewer must face away from the light source. In the case of a glass or positive film stereoview, light filters through the image and directly into the viewer’s eye—the viewer is looking directly at the light source, allowing in far more light than can reflect off the surface of a print. The intensity of light results in highlights that glow as they do in “real life.” The temperature of the light source being used to illuminate the stereographs also plays a role in the experience of the work. A cooler temperature light source (such as an iPhone flashlight) will cause the image to appear to be of a distinctly white light. This may lead one to guess, considering that New York, New York was shot in November, that the image was made around noon. A warmer temperature light source (2900K 70 watt light bulb) lends the image a golden glow and transports me to 3:30 in the afternoon that same day. 101 Abrams, The Spell, 37.

experience other than my own.102 I am confined to my own body, affixed to my own gaze and bound to my inescapable subjective point of view. However, as Roland Barthes so poetically states, the camera allows a “cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity,” and through the stereograph I am able to experience something analogous to leaving my perceptive body for another’s.

The stereographic image is haunting precisely because this experience of

‘switching bodies’ cannot be fully realized. The stereographic image enables me to acquire a different viewpoint, providing an aesthetic equivalent of what it might be like to see the intersubjective world through a different consciousness, yet holds the embodied fulfillment of this desire perpetually out of reach.103 Despite the deceptively haptic quality of the stereograph, it remains only the impression of embodied perception. The stereographic image obviously privileges and is only capable of reproducing one sensory input—visual perception—and is thus an anemic experience in comparison to the complexity of embodied perception in which all senses are involved.

Viewed through a historical lens, it could be argued that much of human expression is a manifestation of the human struggle to fully express what our individual realities are like. Born of frustration with our inability to transcend our own bodies and subjective perceptions, we have a pressing desire to recreate and record our subjective perceptions in an attempt to make our subjective experience objective—to bring a manifestation of it into the intersubjective world where it did not exist before.

102 Abrams, The Spell, 37. Abrams defines solipsistic as: “an approach that seals the philosopher inside his own solitary experience, rendering him ultimately unable to recognize anyone or anything outside of his own mind.” 103 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 1st American ed. ed. (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1981), 12. This is precisely why Roland Barthes writes that “the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity.” The camera makes it possible to adopt the eyes of another, perhaps even to view oneself from the exterior—a point of view that the intertwining of consciousness and body will never allow.

Christopher Wood says that this “carrying over of artistic subjectivity into the domain of the phenomenal” is “what Panofsky means when he calls perspective the ‘objectification of the subjective.’”104 Wood continues: “Perspective encourages a strange kind of identification of the art-object and the world-object. It is perspective, after all, that makes possible the metaphor of a Weltanschauung, a worldview, in the first place.”105 This desire to communicate subjective experience has used perspective as tool to facilitate

“greater knowledge of that which is or can be experienced by many different selves or subjects. The striving for objectivity is thus understood, phenomenologically, as a striving to achieve greater consensus, greater agreement or consonance among a plurality of subjects, rather than as an attempt to avoid subjectivity altogether.”106 In doing so, subjectivity has sought to create a portrait of itself.

The artistic drive to continually develop perspective as a device by which to relay this experience of being in the world continues, according to Hegel, “a tendency, built into the very nature of aesthetic experience—given its fundamental orientation to this movement of unity-in-multiplicity—for experience to seek after an appropriate sensuous image of subjectivity itself.”107 According to Hegel, the

most aesthetically compelling object, that sensuously available object that is capable of putting on display the most sophisticated of unities-in-multiplicity, is,

104 Christopher S. Wood, “Introduction,” introduction to Perspective as Symbolic Form, by Erwin Panofsky, trans. Christopher S. Wood (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1991), 13. 105 Wood, “Introduction,” introduction, 13. 106 David Abrams, The Spell, 38. 107 Ciavatta, “Hegel and the Phenomenology,” 301. Ciavatta writes that “for Hegel, the most aesthetically compelling object, that sensuously available object that is capable of putting on display the most sophisticated of unities-in-multiplicity, is, in the end, nothing other than ourselves: human subjectivity, as it is made sensuously apparent to us in particularly in its embodied and practical forms, is, for Hegel, the richest, most developed exemplification of that process of forging unities in and through multiplicity. And so, for Hegel, there is a tendency, built into the very nature of aesthetic experience—given its fundamental orientation to this movement of unity-in-multiplicity—for experience to seek after an appropriate sensuous image of subjectivity itself. And…it is subjectivity’s drive towards an appropriate self-image that ultimately governs Hegel’s account of art in general.”

in the end nothing other than ourselves: human subjectivity, as it is made sensuously apparent to us particularly in its embodied and practical forms…108

Our own human perception of the world is the richest aesthetic experience available, and artists search for tools by which they can bring us into an awareness of our own perceptions. Perspective has been a quest for the most effective mediums by which to capture a moment of perception so that others may perceive what it is like to be present to this slice of the world. Susan Sontag argues that we translate our perceptions of the world into images in order to be sure of them, explaining:

In the past, a discontent with reality expressed itself as a longing for another world. In modern society, a discontent with reality expresses itself forcefully and most hauntingly by the longing to reproduce this one. As if only by looking at reality in the form of an object—through the fix of the photograph—is it really real, that is, surreal.109

The photograph in conjunction with the stereograph became a partial fulfillment of this desire to reproduce reality, representing a watershed moment in art’s progression from form to consciousness and leading toward new art forms in which the art object is an intangible, cerebral evocation. The stereograph is a merging of imagery and consciousness to create an entirely new, and decidedly phenomenological, art form.

Stephen Shore: A Lifetime of Perceiving

Even though it is most emphatically explored in New York, New York, the thread of visual phenomenology is not isolated to Shore’s work with stereography, but in fact runs strongly throughout several of his other bodies of work. His stereographs are at the intersection, both chronologically and conceptually, of two of his most well-known bodies of work: American Surfaces (1972) and Uncommon Places (1982). Although

Shore’s work has always been conceptually grounded, the artist seeing “each image as a

108 Ciavatta, “Hegel and the Phenomenology,” 301. 109 Sontag, On Photography, 80.

problem to solve,” his photographs, particularly those from American Surfaces and

Uncommon Places, are often analyzed through a historiographical or semiotic methodology, evaluating the work as a deadpan documentation of 1970s Americana culture.110 These approaches, while valuable and connected to the history of photography, risk undercutting the conceptual pursuit of each project and generally fail to explore the phenomenological underpinnings intrinsic to each.111 New York, New York illustrates the evolution of Shore’s ideas and visual interests as he was moving from one perception- focused project to another.

In an essay for the 2015 edition of Uncommon Places: The Complete Works, theoretician Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen illuminates the phenomenological aspects of

Uncommon Places when he encourages the reader to concentrate, “more on how Shore constructs and presents time throughout the series than on the precious singular photograph.”112 Schmidt-Wulffen continues: “Taken as a whole, the images provide a thorough map of what amounts to a lifetime of movements in space and time…Coincidence informs the biographical element in the event: the viewer is presented with what Shore has seen at a particular moment in his life.”113 Shore’s approach functions as an embodiment of American photographer Paul Strand’s famous idiom,

“Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees,” and

110 Quentin Bajac, “Stephen Shore: Solving Pictures,” in Stephen Shore, by Quentin Bajac, et al., comp. The Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 2017), 9. 111 The historiographical and semiotic readings of both bodies of work are, of course, important, relevant and revealing. Shore meticulously recorded the rapidly changing world of 1970s America, providing future generations with one of the most carefully curated visual overviews of this unique moment in America’s cultural and physical evolution. Uncommon Places and American Surfaces are invaluable visual archives, powerful tools that have greatly informed the study of American cultural history. 112 Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, “Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places,” in Uncommon Places: The Complete Works, by Stephen Shore, Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, and Lynne Tillman, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Aperture, 2015), 7. 113 Schmidt-Wulffen, “Stephen Shore’s,” 7.

additionally operates a record of his seeing—a visual diary (and a meticulously documented one, at that) of his phenomenal experience in the world.114

When Shore discusses his own work and the way he approaches photographic vision, he reveals a phenomenological conceptual framework from which all else follows:

One thing I’ve always been interested in is what the world looks like when it’s seen when you’re in a state of heightened awareness. Those moments which I think everyone has, where experience feels more tangible, where experience feels more vivid. And as you walk down the street with that frame of mind, relationships begin to stand out.115

It is this conscious attention to visual perception itself from which all of Shore’s photographs emerge. Shore’s pursuit of this heightened state of perception is, at its core, founded on the same premise as the experiments conducted by installation artists Robert

Irwin and James Turrell in collaboration with NASA scientist Dr. Ed Wortz for nine months in 1968–1969. Irwin, Turrell and Wortz studied perception as a part of a program designed by LACMA curator Maurice Tuchman which sought to discover what artists would create when given access to the minds and equipment available at America’s technological corporations.116 One note from the experiments that the trio conducted, published in LACMA’s Report on the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles

County Museum of Art, 1967–1971, reads

Allowing people to perceive their perceptions—making them aware of their perceptions. We’ve decided to investigate this and to make people conscious of their consciousness…All art is experience, yet all experience is not art. The artist chooses form experience that which he defines out as art, possibly because it has not yet been experienced enough, or because it needs to be experienced more.117

114 Gerry Badger, The Genius of Photography (Quadrille Publishing, 2014), 7. 115 “Stephen Shore | HOW TO SEE the photographer with Stephen Shore,” video file, 10:47, YouTube, posted by The Museum of Modern Art, January 25, 2018, accessed October 28, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=T029CTSO0IE. 116 Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, expanded ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 127. 117 Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting, 131.

Irwin, Turrell and Wortz experimented with intentionally heightening their perceptual awareness of the world through time spent in an anechoic chamber: “a totally sound- dampened, light-blackened room” that blocks out all perceptual stimuli and encloses the participant in complete darkness and absolute silence.118 The anechoic chamber at UCLA was “suspended so that even the rotation of the earth was not reflected in it, or any sounds being bounced through the earth,” and after a period of six to eight hours of complete sensory deprivation, the participant would emerge with a drastically heightened threshold of perceptual awareness.119

The camera is Shore’s anechoic chamber, pushing him to tune in to the “extreme complexity and richness of [the human] sense mechanism and how little of it we use most of the time.”120 When being in the world with the express purpose of making photographs, one begins to exercise a different kind of visual perception. The photograph itself changes the way that we see the world, but the camera changes the way that we engage with it, altering the way we perceive our surrounding environment within the flow of time. This conscious engagement with the world in the pursuit of an image of it results in greater perceptual receptivity to the visual world. Shore actively practices this state of heightened awareness and sees the camera as a tool that can teach average people to engage with the sensorial world with the opened and amplified receptivity that Irwin is striving for.121 When he began his teaching career at Bard College in New York, Shore

118 Ibid, 132. 119 Ibid, 132. 120 Ibid, 134. 121 The projects, goals and outcome of Irwin and Shore’s work, while grounded in the same basic concept of heightened receptivity to the phenomenal world, are vastly different, but what they have in common is their conscious practicing of this state of heightened attention and their eschewing of traditional subject matter. Shore focuses exclusively on the visual—the quality of light, how jumbled elements coalesce into an ordered composition, how the photographic image can convey a sense of three-dimensional space. Irwin, on the other hand, constructs or alters three-dimensional spaces (retaining most or all of the perceptual

took into consideration the fact that Bard is a liberal arts college, not a fine arts school, and thus asked himself what skill he could “teach through photography that would benefit anyone.” 122 He determined that photography can be a tool for learning to see with “with conscious attention” and “self-awareness,” and that this practice feeds the mind and is a beneficial skill for everyone, not just photographers.123 When in possession of a camera, the photographer not only becomes acutely aware of the way in which the world appears, but also finds himself involved in Ciavatta’s “special kind of attunement to the distinctive nature of human experience, one that breaks with our natural, objectivist attitudes toward the world and that thereby involves a kind of proto-phenomenological orientation towards experience.”124

Often analyzed by its result (the photographic image), this kind of explicit attunement to the act of seeing in pursuit of a photograph, called “photographic seeing,” is widely recognized among both photographers and writers of photographic theory, such as Susan Sontag. Sontag writes that a photographer’s work is proof not only of what exists in the world, but is substantiation of “what an individual sees,” describing photographs “not just a record but an evaluation of the world.”125 Sontag explains:

elements of any given situation) and is engaged with all elements of perception, particularly invisible aspects such as sound, energy fields, the presence of things, smells, vibrations, the conscious passage of time, temperature, etc. The photographic image does not pretend to be a true or complete time capsule of any given moment and is clearly incapable of recording all of the elements present to perception at any given moment. However, the mental attitudes and increased perceptual receptivity to the world is the common thread between Shore and Irwin. As a photographer I understand this mindset; particularly when using a large format camera my eyes get a bit wider, I'm more sensitive to the light, the wind, the way that things actually appear. I try to shut off my “labeling” brain and open myself up to how things are, how they make themselves evident to me, rather than if they're subject matter “worthy” of photographing. Susan Sontag, On Photography, 4, describes the camera as “the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.” 122 “Stephen Shore | HOW TO SEE,” video file. 123 “Stephen Shore | HOW TO SEE,” video file. 124 Ciavatta, “Hegel and the Phenomenology,” 298. 125 Sontag, On Photography, 88-89.

It became clear that there was not just a simple, unitary activity called seeing (recorded by, aided by cameras) but ‘photographic seeing,’ which was both a new way for people to see and a new activity for them to perform…Photographic seeing meant an aptitude for discovering beauty in what everybody sees but neglects as too ordinary.126 (italics mine)

The very act of making photographs is a phenomenological endeavor, requiring that the photographer become distinctly aware of the way in which the visible world presents itself to his conscious perceptions.127 American Surfaces, Uncommon Places, and New

York, New York were all explorations of the phenomenon of visual perception itself, as well as the unique way that the camera is able to capture and interpret multi-dimensional perception.

Throughout his career, Shore has retained this fundamental interest: “seeing with conscious attention.”128 New York, New York is one body of work that operates as the conceptual and practical bridge connecting two important collections in Shore’s oeuvre:

American Surfaces (1972) and Uncommon Places (1982). The three bodies of work developed and expanded Shore’s aesthetic, featuring similar subject matter and color palettes, but used vastly different equipment that produced quite different results.

American Surfaces was shot with a 35mm Rollei camera, the “precursor to the point-and- shoot,” Uncommon Places (begun in 1973 but first published in 1982) was created with

126 Ibid. 127 Shore and Irwin are clearly after different ends, but what they have in common is their attention to and their ability to find beauty and significance in the everyday, the common, the banal. In Welscher, Seeing is Forgetting, 270–271, Irwin states that Pop Art “was a case of taking the lessons of abstract expressionism, that heightened overall focus over the entire picture plane, the further leavening of such hierarchies as figure and ground, and taking that aesthetic back into the world, applying that way of seeing to the most common objects in the world, taking, say, a humble, meaningless Campbell’s soup can and lavishing that sort of even attention on it, too. And here, it’s like I am saying, you know the kind of attention you have been taught to lavish on a Renaissance landscape within its as-if window frame, try lavishing that sort of attention on the world itself. In fact, get rid of the window! Just experience the world!” Clearly Irwin would argue against Shore’s capturing of reality through the photograph, and would probably call it, as he does in Welscher, Seeing is Forgetting, 65, a “second order of reality,” while Irwin himself is “after a first order of presence.” 128 “Stephen Shore | HOW TO SEE,” video file.

an 8-by-10 inch view camera, and New York, New York, (1974) was produced with a stereoscopic camera, yet the conceptual underpinnings of all three remain closely related.129

American Surfaces was about the very act of seeing, and Shore described the resulting effect of the photographs “as though one is seeing through my eyes.”130 In an interview filmed at MoMA inside Shore’s retrospective, Shore elaborated on the idea that spurred and motivated American Surfaces, stating

One thing I wanted to do was take pictures that felt like they were not burdened with visual conventions. I wanted to take pictures that felt like seeing…So what I would do, as an exercise, is various moments during the day, at random moments, I would become aware of my field of vision. To put it in modern terms, it would be like taking a screenshot of my field of vision. And I did this so I could see what it was like to see, what the experience of seeing looked like.131

Eschewing the “the more conventional language about how a picture is supposed to be constructed,” Shore embarked on a project to explore what the experience of seeing was like, aided by the mobility of his 35mm camera.132 These fundamental aspects and motivations of American Surfaces would be repeated in New York, New York, but heightened by the stereograph’s uncanny ability to recreate human visual perception. By using a stereoscopic camera, Shore continued this line of inquiry into the nature of human perception and the camera’s ability to reproduce it, linking the experience of “seeing” that Shore explored through American Surfaces to the potential for the photograph to become a self-contained world, as demonstrated through Uncommon Places.

129 Lange, “Nothing Overlooked,” 59, 73, 146. American Surfaces was first exhibited in a solo show by the same name at Light Gallery in New York City in a 1972. 130 “Stephen Shore | HOW TO SEE,” video file. 131 “Stephen Shore | HOW TO SEE,” video file 132 Stephen Shore, “Stephen Shore. American Surfaces. 1972-73,” The Museum of Modern Art, accessed October 28, 2018, https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/45/717.

In Uncommon Places, Shore was not only focusing on the camera’s ability to capture what it felt like to perceive the world, but also capitalizing on the large format photograph’s ability to create a self-contained world for the viewer to investigate. Shore relied on the “descriptive power of the camera to make a complex picture that the viewer moves their attention through,” in an effort to create “a small world for a viewer to explore, rather than the impression of what its like to look through [his] eyes.”133

Although the images created by the Stereo Realist cannot compete with a large format negative in size or amount of detail captured, the goal of creating a “small world” for the viewer to investigate is certainly achieved in New York, New York.134

Conclusion

The histories of art and of human consciousness meet in the empathic experience of stereography, adding a chapter in the developing story of perspective and visualizing several tenets of Phenomenology. Stephen Shore is one of the only artists who has ever used stereography in such a way that these historical and philosophical developments come forcibly to light, and the caliber of New York, New York reveals not only what the medium makes possible, but also exposes the need for the further development of the theory, artistic use, and historiography of the stereograph. The implications of the stereograph on the history of our visual field will be key as we continually analyze past innovations in order to develop present ideas.

133 “Stephen Shore | HOW TO SEE,” video file. 134 In New York, New York, this effect is not achieved through the inclusion of several minute details or the photograph exhibited as a large print, but through the stereograph’s inherent simulation of depth, which gradually reveals itself to the viewer as it is experienced for extended amounts of time. When viewing Shore’s stereographs, their perceptual effect only grows stronger with time, as the eyes learn to navigate the three-dimensional image. The mind learns to “feel” its way into the spaces that the stereograph creates, to not only feel the impact of the physical bodies and objects that the stereographs make solid, but also to intuit the shapes of the negative spaces that are expanded within a stereograph.

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Figures

Figure 1.Visitors at MoMA’s Stephen Shore retrospective viewing Shore’s stereographs, New York, New York, through metal viewing boxes. 2018. Image courtesy of the author.

Figure 2. Stephen Shore, New York, New York (1974), published in View-Master format. Photo courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art online, https://store.moma.org/prints- artists/artist-products/stephen-shore-stereographs-1974/200498-200498.html.

Figure 17. Wheatstone stereoscope schema. Image courtesy of Wikipedia online, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Charles_Wheatstone.

Figure 18. Sir David Brewster’s handheld stereograph, invented in 1849. Image courtesy of Research Gate online, https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Brewster-stereoscope- 1849-10_fig1_282015090.

Figure 20. French Table Top Stereoscope Cabinet Viewer (exterior). Image courtesy of Fleaglass online, http://www.fleaglass.com/ads/french-table-top-stereoscope-cabinet- viewer/