Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} George Washington Wilson Artist and Photographer by Roger Taylor George Washington Wilson: Artist and Photographer by Roger Taylor. This site, like many others, uses cookies. See more details here. George Washington Wilson. Here are brief comments on some of the events in George Washington Wilson's life: - 1853: Exhibited photographs in exhibition (Exhibition not listed below.) - 1854: Appointed by Prince Albert to take photographs of the Royal Family at Balmoral, for which he was paid 3 Gns per day. - 1855: Began to produce annual photo-collages of many of the well known characters of Aberdeen. This brought in business as more people competed to be included in the collages. - 1873: Appointed 'Photographer Royal' to Her Majesty Queen Victoria. - 1880: GWW was selling his views in his Tours of Scotland albums. The purchaser was allowed to choose which photos should be included in their album, from a selection of over 10,000 photos in the GWW Collection. The GW Wilson business continued by his sons following the death of George in 1893. Postcards were sold from 1902 onwards, but the business did not survive against the competition from Valentine & Sons and others. Following the collapse of the company in 1908, Archie Strachan purchased 27,000 G W Wilson negatives and a number of albums, together weighing over five tons! He, later, donated these to the Queen Mother University LIbrary, Aberdeen. David Jamieson, Haywards Heath, West Sussex, England: June 11, 2010. Acknowledgement. Bibliography. 1. For a fuller account of the life and work of GW Wilson, I recommend the book: George Washington Wilson - Artist and Photographer (1823-93) by Roger Taylor. Photographs. Exhibitions. George Washington Wilson exhibited his photos in these early exhibitions: - 1855: British Association, Glasgow. - 1856: Edinburgh Photographic Society. - 1857: Art Treasures, Manchester. - 1858: Edinburgh Photographic Society. - 1859: British Association, Glasgow. - 1859: Glasgow Photographic Society. - 1861: London Photographic Society. - 1862: London International Exhibition. Source: Photographs Exhibited in Britain 1839-65 (Roger Taylor) GWW travelled widely throughout Scotland in search of photogr aphs for his business, based in Aberdeen. Wilson's company finally went into liquidation in 1908, though many of his glass plate negatives were purchased by a former employee, Fred Hardie, and used to make post cards until 1920. The University of Aberdeen now holds a collection of 45,000 glass plate negatives that survived from the 1908 liquidation. These have been the subject of research by Roger Taylor. The University of Aberdeen has published a series of booklets featuring GW Wilson photographs i n different areas of Scotland. Photographic Society of Scotland. Princes Street. GW Wilson became a member of the Photographic Society of Scotland and exhibited photos in PSS Exhibitions. Below are some examples of his photo graphs taken in Edinburgh and Newhaven. View to the East from Waverley. Carte de Visite. � Reproduced by courtesy of National Galleries of Scotland. See Copyright Notice. Here is a carte de visite of Princes Street, taken in 1860 by George Washington Wilson. This view of Princes Street is a cut-down version taken from a stereo pair. GW Wilson was reported in the photographic press of 1859 to have taken the first "instantaneous view" from this position. An instantaneous view was one taken with a short exposure and so showing individual figures in the scene, rather than the empty streets captured by longer exposures where none of the subjects stays still for long enough to have their images captured on film. Newhaven Fishwives. GWW - 10,000 views. G W Wilson used a specially designed wide-angle lens for his views. His catalogue in the 1880s listed more than 10,000 views of Scotland. About George Washington Wilson. The George Washington Wilson and Co. photographic collection consists of over 37,000 glass plate negatives, produced by the Aberdeen firm between the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. George Washington Wilson (1823-1893), born in the North East of Scotland, went to Edinburgh and then London in the 1840s to train as a portrait miniaturist. He became established in Aberdeen in the 1850s as an artist and photographer, and quickly made a name for himself among the middle classes and landed gentry. His patronage by the Royal Family during their visits to the Balmoral Estates began in 1854 when he was invited to take photographs of the Royal family in the grounds of Balmoral. He received the official appointment of Photographer Royal for Scotland in 1860 and his relationship with the Royal family continued throughout his career. Wilson’s success allowed him to employ staff photographers to carry out the routine portraiture business whilst he travelled the country indulging in his new interest in landscape photography. Wilson won a number of prizes for his photographic works including winning medals at the Great London International Exhibition of 1862 for his experimentation for quick exposures. George Washington Wilson and Co., captured images from all over Britain, recording everything from the natural grandeur of Fingal's Cave on the Isle of Staffa to the bustle of London's Oxford Street. Wilson had a staff of photographers including his son, Charles Wilson, who with senior staff photographer Fred Hardie, toured the colonial townships of South Africa. Dispatched to capture images of Australia in 1892, Hardie also travelled through Queensland, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. These tours provide a vivid picture of gold miners and early settlers at work and play, and of the native or aboriginal way of life. The company invested in sourcing independent photographer to capture the western Mediterranean, where they took images of Gibraltar and the south of Spain, Morocco and Tangiers. Throughout, Wilson demonstrated technical and commercial acumen, and, by the early 1880s, the company he founded had become the largest and best-known photographic and printing firm in Scotland. Wilson handed the business over to his sons, Charles, Louis and John Wilson in 1888. The company, however, only survived for a short time under the management of Wilson’s sons, with much of the company being sold in 1905 and the company finally ceasing trading in 1908. The company stock was auctioned off in 1908. The plates passed into the possession of Fred Hardie, and then to the photographer, Archibald J. B. Strachan, who in 1954, offered them to the University Library. The University is pleased to acknowledge the foresight and beneficence of Mr Strachan. The entire collection of ‘George Washington Wilson and Company’ glass plate negatives is available digitally on our website. Each high resolution image provides a superb level of detail and the collection is fully searchable. Access to the original glass plates is therefore not permitted for conservation reasons. Brian May talks about major new stereo photography book. Brian’s London Stereoscopic Company has recently republished a book on the Scottish stereoscopic photographer George Washington Wilson, written by leading photographic historian, Professor Roger Taylor (no relation). Washington Wilson (1823-93) became the toast of Victorian society with his innovative landscape photography and was hired to work for Queen Victoria. We caught up with Brian and Professor Taylor for a chat. Brian, when did you first become aware of George Washington Wilson? Hmm, it must have been about 40 years ago, as I have been collecting stereoscopic cards from quite a young age. Washington Wilson’s cards always stood out: they had a lovely cardboard back, with beautiful sepia prints pasted on top. They are always in wonderful condition as he got his processes so perfect, so they don’t fade or get messed up with age. It wasn’t until I met Roger that I began to understand what Washington Wilson means in terms of British photographic history, however. So how do you meet Professor Taylor? We met at a museum, at a celebration of a 150 years of British photography, and we both bemoaned the fact there were no stereoscopic images there at all. It’s really been sidelined. Roger is my mentor and a good friend, so Roger and I are on a crusade to let people know that 3D photography is alive and well! Professor Taylor, Washington Wilson is is known as a great innovator in stereoscopic photography, can you summarise some of these innovations? One of the things he did was to incorporate the sky and the ground in one single image. He introduced scenery that had water in the foreground, at sunset, so there was red sky, with lots of clouds reflected in the water, and he could balance everything up and point his camera directly at the sun – which was quite an innovation around 1858/9. He also took very short exposures. With the collodion process of those days you had to make exposures of several seconds. He managed to get it down to about an eighth of a second, so he was able to take street scenes which looked realistic. Other photographers soon wanted to follow this example. Does any of his gear survive? Sadly not, but we know the kinds of camera he used. Dallmeyer, a leading manufacturer of stereoscopic cameras, made a customised model for him around 1862. What are your favourite Washington Wilson images? Professor Taylor: For me, it is his image of Princess St in Edinburgh, on a busy day, with carriages going by. It was the first glimpse of a truthful live representation of a city scene. Before that it was all posed long exposures, so the image pointed the way forward. Brian May: For me it’s his image of Lake Katrine, composed so you feel like you are on the bank seeing into the distance, seeing the island on the lake. Oops I should have said Loch Katrine! My mother was Scottish, she would kill me! Professor Taylor: Indeed, that photo was very popular with the public, and there are 60 different versions in the Aberdeen archive. He kept returning to that scene. He also shot a very famous portrait of Queen Victoria on a pony, which became one of the most iconic images of the Queen as a widow, following the death of Prince Albert. He put it out as a carte de visite, and sold 120,000 copies. Do you hope this book will go some way to restore George Washington Wilson’s reputation? Brian May: We hope so. There has been a sort of stigma associated with stereoscopic photography, a kind of snobbish attitude towards it. For me, this is THE most evocative portrayal of life as it was in Scotland. It’s much more real than flat photographs. Professor Taylor: If you view stereoscopic images with a viewer, such as the Owl viewer which Brian developed, it fills the mental space in your head. It’s a bit like watching iMax movies – an extraordinarily immersive experience compared to a print. George Washington Wilson: Artist and Photographer, by Professor Roger Taylor, Intro by Brian May, The London Stereoscopic Company, is available from all good booksellers now for £30. George Washington Wilson: Artist and Photographer by Roger Taylor. The George Washington Wilson Photographic Archive: a Postscript. by R.V. Pringle (March 2008 - rev. January 2011) This 'postscript' is based on an article that was published with the proceedings of the George Washington Wilson Centenary Conference held at the University of Aberdeen in March 1993. See By royal appointment: Aberdeen's pioneer photographer, George Washington Wilson, 1823-1893 . Aberdeen: AUL Publishing in association with the Centre for Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen, 1997 (ISBN 1-874078-08-4 : 39pp., 54 plates). "Yesterday evening a serious fire occurred in Aberdeen, by which part of the works of Messrs G.W. Wilson & Co., artists and photographers to the Queen . were destroyed." So begins the newspaper account of an incident in June 1882 which cost Wilson 'a number of valuable transparencies which it will be impossible to replace', together with much of his stock of photographic prints. 1. "The Fire Brigade, under Inspector Anderson, arrived about a quarter-past seven, and in a few minutes had five hose pipes playing on the burning building. By this time, however, the fire [which started in the attic] had spread to the rooms underneath, and before the brigade succeeded in overcoming the flames the roof had fallen in, and the whole of the second storey, as well as the attic, were totally gutted." Happily the prompt arrival of the fire brigade, aided by the design of the St Swithin Street premises – this separated the publishing offices facing the street from the printing works at the rear – saved the firm's stock of glass plate negatives, estimated at 'upwards of 60,000' in number. Today more than a century later the University can count itself truly fortunate that so many of Mr Wilson's 'treasures on glass' (the phrase is Heather Lyall's) 2 have survived. They came to the University in 1954 from A.J.B. (Archie) Strachan, one of Aberdeen's leading commercial and industrial photographers – via, it is thought, a staff photographer, Fred W. Hardie, to whom Strachan was apprenticed in his youth. The University's collection of around 39,000 plates (including 'duplicates') 16 equates to perhaps sixty-five per cent of the working stock of the company when it was wound up at auction in 1908. In that year the firm still had over 60,000 negatives: not an enormous figure considering that, at the height of its activities in the 1880s and 1890s, it was able to offer around 20,000 different views 3 in two, three or even four print sizes; but certainly enough to emphasise the firm's pre-eminence over a long period in the world of photographic publishing. 4. The negatives now in the care of the University's Historic Collections date from the late 1850s down to the early years of the twentieth century. They cover not only Aberdeen and the North East but the whole of Scotland and most of England, as well as parts of Wales and Northern Ireland, Gibraltar, Morocco including Tangier, the South of Spain, and (especially) colonial South Africa and Australia. 5. A common misconception – and it applies as much to the many negatives in the University's care as to the smaller collections of prints, slides, albums and negatives held elsewhere – is that a 'GWW' photograph must have been taken by the great man himself. The truth is that as time went by, and especially in the 1870s and 1880s, Wilson relied on others to add to his stock. Thus all of the Mediterranean views and many of the English and Scottish series are the work of staff photographers, or were commissioned by the company from photographic firms elsewhere in the UK. In fact many of the negatives were created long after Wilson had handed over the business to his sons, Charles, Louis and John Hay Wilson, in 1888. The spectacular Australian and South African images, illustrating 'the land and people of the British Colonies, old and new' and including 'the chief native races and mining industries', were added to the firm's stock in the 1890s as a result of the activities of Charles Wilson and of staff photographers such as Fred Hardie following Wilson's death in 1893; and it is to Charles Wilson, who had accompanied his father on many a photographic trip and evidently learned much from him about the photographer's art, that the University owes many of its best London street scenes. It was Fred Hardie who set himself up after the closure of the firm in 1908 as a portrait photographer in Union Street, with photographic printing premises in Justice Mill Lane. 6 He appears to have acquired most of the working stock of negatives around that time and to have continued to make postcards for the tourist market until about 1920, using both original GWW plates and his own accumulating stock. 7 He retired in or around 1935 and sold the photographic business including the premises at 416 Union Street to J.J. Farquhar who, however, died very soon after taking over. Archie Strachan, still only 20, then bought the business from Farquhar's widow. 8. By all recent accounts Hardie acquired the bulk of the G.W. Wilson & Co. working stock in July 1908 when some 65,000 negatives were offered for auction at the firm's printing works in St Swithin Street. This simply cannot be true. The negatives were offered in 68 lots, amounting to just over 20,000 'subjects', county by county, area by area; 16 lots representing around a quarter (5,211) of the 20,387 'subjects' remained unsold including all of the early stereoscopic negatives – though most appear to have found a buyer at a second, knock-down sale in September. 9 Heather Lyall states that the ' unsold lots passed to Fred Hardie who . had also purchased some negatives of local interest'. Others go so far as to suggest that he bought up to 45,000 negatives. 10 The auctioneer's records make it clear, however, that Hardie did not buy any except the 1,143 Australian pictures (lot 260) which he had probably taken or commissioned himself; and the 'local interest' material to which Lyall refers – presumably Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire – was bought not by Hardie but by the Aberdeen printing firm of Bailie Middleton and an Elgin bookseller, Yeadon. 11. It is of course possible that what Hardie actually acquired was a very considerable quantity of negatives duplicating those offered for sale. 12 Another, at first sight credible, hypothesis is that Hardie obtained most of his negatives, not from the sale(s) in 1908 but from the stock with which, until 1913, Charles Wilson kept the small but separate Wilson Bros. lantern slide business going. According to Charles Wilson, however, interviewed by Helmut Gernsheim in 1952, the 'pick' of the landscape negatives were sold in 1913 for 'a mere trifle' to Newton & Co., London, while the bulk of the portrait negatives were buried in the garden (now part of Westburn Park, Aberdeen) of the firm's premises at Loch-head House. 13. What we do know for certain is that when Hardie's successor-but-one, Archie Strachan, moved to new premises in 1953, he had to decide what to do with a large quantity of glass plate negatives lying unused and all but forgotten in a darkened basement at 416 Union Street. With interest in Victorian photography at a low ebb, he might have been forgiven for simply consigning the glass plate – all five tons of it – to the nearest dustcart. Instead, he made the imaginative decision to gift the negatives to Aberdeen University where they now form one of the University's most valued collections. The University thought it was getting about 10,000 negatives of mainly local interest, and so it was reported in the press. 14 By 1959 the collection size was estimated at around 20,000 but by 1964, when preliminary sorting and listing was complete, it was found to contain nearly 27,000 separate images 15 – excluding a sizeable quantity of so-called 'duplicates' 16 – extending well beyond the confines of the North East of Scotland. Heather Lyall, who has written the most comprehensive account thus far of the collection and its origins, tells us that much of the early unpacking and sorting was done using student help during the summer vacations. 17 The negatives were 'stored in individual sleeves, arranged by plate size, and so far as possible identified from the original Wilson catalogues'. Because of pressures on space the negatives were kept at first in Marischal College and then transferred some ten years later to Library storage in Old Aberdeen in the shape of a former shooting gallery (the Elphinstone undercroft) at King's College. The Librarian, Douglas Simpson, a North East scholar of some note, was concerned that this 'unique archive' be stored in the best possible conditions, with adequate temperature and humidity controls. With support from successive Convenors of his Library Committee (notably, the distinguished geographer, Professor A.C.O'Dell) he pressed for the creation, first, of a central photographic unit under Library management to serve teaching departments in Old Aberdeen; then for suitable premises and equipment to store the negatives; and finally for the appointment of a full-time photographic curator. 18. In fact it was to take more than a quarter of century for the University fully to get to grips with what it had acquired almost by accident, and with what had not yet been recognised by many outside the Library as the major acquisition it undoubtedly was – one of the most important photographic archives in the whole of the UK. For the negatives to become truly accessible they had to be properly catalogued and indexed, by topic or feature as well as place; and since browsing amongst several tons of glass was hardly practicable they had to be copied in some way onto paper or film. Following the creation of a Photographic Department in 1956-57, steady progress was made on sorting and identifying the negatives. By the mid- 1960s it was possible to undertake selective printing in support of research – in, for example, Professor O' Dell's own field of transport history. At the same time work began on a subject index of Scottish material (completed in 1967-68) and on the systematic printing of negatives of Scottish interest, though because of pressure of work this had to be suspended in 1970-71. 19. Twenty years on, better progress began to be made. Spurred on by a growing interest from south of the Border in the person of Roger Taylor, 20 then teaching at Sheffield Polytechnic, 21 the University embarked during the 1970s on a project to copy the entire set of negatives onto 'aperture card' microfilm, in order to allow a comprehensive catalogue to be compiled; and at the end of 1979, a further important step forward came with the British Library agreeing to fund a three-year indexing project. 22. The Library's Annual Report for 1979-80 records some of the problems which the new Research Assistant, Elizabeth Bennett, identified at the outset. While copy film had by this time been made for each of the negatives, the arrangements for storing such a large quantity of glass plate were less than satisfactory. There were also difficulties in meeting the growing requirement for prints because of other demands on the time of the Library's photographic technicians; and a continuing concern that over-handling could result in damage to or deterioration of the negatives. The Library did however accept that it had a responsibility to show material from the collection to a wider public, and a number of exhibitions were arranged including one which toured the Western Isles in 1977-78. In addition the Library embarked in 1983 on a series of booklets (still ongoing) illustrating its holdings of Scottish material; and following the arrival of the present writer as Librarian in 1988, several new publishing and promotional ventures were undertaken with the enthusiastic participation of the newly designated Photographic Curator, Michael Craig and his assistant Caroline Gilbert (now Caroline Craig). By the time of Elizabeth Bennett's departure in February 1983, around half of the collection had been fully catalogued but much of the work of identification and description had been completed. Thereafter arrangements were made to continue the project under the general direction of staff in the Department of Special Collections & Archives; 23 and following the creation of a photographic suite in the newly extended Queen Mother Library, the negatives were transferred there in stages between 1983 and 1988 for greater security and improved environmental control. In the early days of cataloguing, simple thematic or place-name lists had been compiled. Under Bennett's direction, from 1979 to 1983, a much more thorough approach was adopted. First, 4" x 6" 'main entry' cards were made for each negative in turn. These recorded not only geographical location and details of scenic and other features, but also information about the size and state of the negative, whether it was 'duplicated' in some way (many so-called duplicates have since turned out on closer inspection to be significantly different re-takes) and when and by whom the photograph was first registered at Stationers' Hall or when it first appeared in one of the firm's catalogues. Additional index cards were then made to guide readers from topical, topographical or geographical terms to the 'main entry'. A drawback to the system, recognised early on by Bennett, was that the microfilm aperture card could not be found directly from any of the various types of index heading and indeed did not carry any of the details present on the main catalogue card; and she notes in her final report that for greater efficiency in searching 'the catalogue card and visual image should be united in one format'. 24. What Bennett saw in 1983 as an ideal to be aimed at and what, indeed, Taylor partly envisaged as long ago as 1974 became a reality in the early 1990s with the advent of computer-based technology. The first phase involved 'fractal imaging' and its application to the GWW Archive (or rather to the 39,000 microfilm images already created) by a local company, DDS (Aberdeen) Ltd. 25 This allowed some five tons of glass to be captured on an optical disk weighing no more than five ounces. It also provided something approaching the power of a modern infomation retrieval system with access to place names, dates, catalogue numbers, negative size and other features derived from the old catalogue records, now digitised. 26. In my original published 'postscript' in 1993 I suggested that there was a need to refine and adapt the indexing terminology to take full advantage of free-text searching capabilities, and to investigate other forms of digitisation that could be applied to the glass plate negatives themselves. The vision then was to bring out features that are as yet hardly visible to the naked eye, and perhaps to sequence the pictures in such a way that we create the illusion of actually walking along some of the streets in the cities, towns and villages that were once captured on glass by GWW and his assistants. Fifteen years on there is encouraging evidence – as a glance at the University's web site will show – that this indeed is now beginning to happen. The GWW Archive is used and appreciated more than ever as a fount of socio-historical information. It gives constant delight to ordinary members of the public as a source of clear, beautifully composed images from the past – a truly memorable window on the Victorian world. Professor O'Dell in the 1960s saw the value of the collection from a predominantly academic perspective, as preserving the visual record of altered landscapes. Today we tend to focus more on the human and aesthetic interest which so many of these images have: not just the places themselves, attractive though these are, but the people, both ordinary and exotic, who inhabit a real world brought alive by the magic of photography. George Washington Wilson: Artist and Photographer by Roger Taylor. GEORGE WASHINGTON WILSON - Artist and Photographer (1823-93) By Roger Taylor - Introduction by Brian May. Published today by The London Stereoscopic Company. Click here to order now. STEREOSCOPIC MASTERPIECE EXPLORING THE LIFE AND WORK OF LEADING VICTORIAN PHOTOGRAPHER, GEORGE WASHINGTON WILSON. Brian May unwraps yet another "labour of love" "George Washington Wilson" by Prof Roger Taylor, published today, 15 August 2018, by his own imprint, The London Stereoscopic Company. Read Brian's comments @ www.brianmay.com. Listen to Brian and Roger talk about the book on BBC Radio 4 here. (Starts at 18mins 30secs) NEWSFLASH: More tickets have just been released to attend the launch of Brian May and Prof Roger Taylor’s #GeorgeWashingtonWilson in Aberdeen on August 16th, the birthplace of the great Scottish Victorian artist and photographer. More details @ here. “It’s my great pleasure to introduce to you all this beautiful book, at the request of its author, my great friend Professor Roger Taylor. It’s been many years in the making, and I’m confident it will have been worth every minute. It presents the life and work of celebrated Scottish landscape photographer George Washington Wilson, who, with great skill and flair, photographed the unique beauties of the Scottish countryside in the 1860s with his stereoscopic camera. The resulting 3-D images proved immensely successful and established Wilson’s national reputation as a pre- eminent photographer. Now, courtesy of the Lite OWL included with every book, Wilson’s images can be experienced in exactly the same way they were enjoyed by the Victorian public.” Brian May. When photography was first introduced to Britain in the early 19th century, Scotland adopted the process with great interest and enthusiasm. A leading practitioner was George Washington Wilson whose innovations in stereoscopic photography created some of the most captivating 3-D photographs of the period and established his reputation, both nationally and internationally. He began his career as a portrait miniature painter, but in the early 1850s he took up photography and established a portrait studio in his hometown of Aberdeen. One of his earliest commissions was to photograph the construction of the new Balmoral Castle, and the success of these studies led to other assignments, including portrait sessions of Queen Victoria and members of the Royal Family. He was subsequently appointed Photographer to the Queen. By the 1860’s Wilson had established his national reputation through a series of technical and aesthetic innovations that significantly advanced the art of stereoscopy and topographic photography. As a result, his business as a photographer, publisher, and retailer of images for the tourist market rapidly expanded, and within a few years, he dominated the field. George Washington Wilson, Artist, and Photographer , for the very first time, allows readers to view Wilson’s work in its original three-dimensional format. Stereocard by George Washington Wilson, “Ellen's Island, Loch Katrine, Nº 36.” This image was made to be seen in 3-D in one of the numerous refracting stereoscopes that found their way in the parlours of the middle class from 1851 onwards and enabled people to travel to far away destination without leaving their fireside. Prof Roger Taylor, the world authority on Wilson, traces his career, captures the essence of the man and presents a glorious gallery of his work in colour (from striking landscape imagery to portraits of royals) with over eighty 3-D stereo cards which can be viewed with the complimentary viewer (Lite OWL, designed by Brian May, included with the book). Brian May is one of the world’s foremost collectors of 3-D photography, and his archive includes many works by George Washington Wilson and in this collaboration with Roger Taylor, he shares images from the collection. About the author. Prof Roger Taylor has spent his entire professional life working with photography, initially as a commercial and industrial photographer before moving into teaching on the Fine Art course at Sheffield College of Art during the 1960’s. It was here that he became fascinated by the history of the medium and began his research into George Washington Wilson whilst studying for his Master's Degree in Victorian Studies at Leicester University. His commitment to photographic history led to his appointment at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, in Bradford, where he was responsible for the installation of a new Kodak Museum, which opened in 1989. Seven years later he took early retirement to pursue his researches into mid- Victorian photography, specialising in the emergence of early processes in Britain 1839-1865. Following a number of research fellowships within major collections in Canada and America, he was appointed as a Senior Research Fellow at De Montfort University, where he is now Professor Emeritus. In 2014 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Derby in recognition of his significant contributions to photographic history. About the London Stereoscopic Company and the birth of the OWL. Sometime in 1854 ‘The London Stereoscope Company was born. Its business was selling stereo views and viewers to the public, and they were leaders in a huge boom – a craze which swept England, Europe, and eventually the United States too, of stereo photographs of every conceivable subject, which, viewed by means of a stereoscope, presented scenes in life-like three dimensions. In a world which had never experienced Television, the Movies, or the Internet, this was a major sensation. In February 1856, The London Stereoscopic Company (LSC) advertised, in the Photographic Journa l, “The largest collection in Europe, upwards of 100,000 stereo views.” Brian May’s introduction to stereoscopy was as a child finding 3-D cards in his breakfast cereal. In the 1950s Weetabix gave away free coloured stereo cards in their packets, along with an opportunity to send off one-and-sixpence for the stereoscope required to view them. Brian, discovering that he could free-view them without the viewer too, was entranced, and quickly figured out how to make his own stereo views, and was hooked for life. Scouring Portobello Road market for stereoscopic items some years later, Brian discovered the intriguing Diableries cards, which stirred a special passion, which was to lead to the Diableries book 40 years later. While studying Astronomy at Imperial College, Brian became a regular viewer at Christie’s photographic auctions, at the time a rich source of long-forgotten stereoviews from the 1850s onwards which were turning up in people’s attics. In 2008 Brian realised his dream of recreating The London Stereoscopic Company (LSC), its aim to bring the magic of true stereoscopy to the modern world. In order to share Victorian 3-D, Brian designed his own OWL stereoscope, which is now produced in large quantities. The OWL has become a new standard around the world in stereoscopic viewing. In 2011 Brian met a redoubtable French scholar, Denis Pellerin, one of the world’s experts on French and English Photographic History. Their two passions connected immediately, and Denis became Brian’s curator, conservator, researcher, and co-author. The London Stereoscopic Company is now restoring and republishing Victorian classic cards, as well as original stereoscopic works on other subjects. Finally, the LSC completed the picture by entering into book publishing, each new work accompanied by an OWL stereoscope included in the package. George Washington Wilson, Artist and Photographer will be the LSC’s sixth title. The London Stereoscopic Company is the ONLY publisher in the world dedicated exclusively to publishing stereoscopic works. The LSC’s mission is to share the world’s greatest 3-D images, from Victorian time to present day.