“An Opportunity to Grapple with the Picture Plane…": The Stereo-Illusion’s History of Frustration

“To make illusion almost tangible” was a formulation often used in advertising the hand-held nineteenth-century wooden viewing device that would become known worldwide as the “stereoscope,” namely, an instrument designed to simulate the three-dimensional visuality of human eyesight. Despite its portable, unassuming design, which came from simplifications to its originally massive scientific predecessor, the stereoscope ushered in a minor revolution in the circulation, distribution, and exchange of photographic images globally. Priced in a manner to make it affordable to the bourgeoisie, it required only minor investments in photographic inserts before the owner’s stereoscopic collection could become the occasion for parlor games, armchair travel, and other opportunities for social exchange. Long understood as a nineteenth-century forerunner to mass visual media, stereoscopy nonetheless developed into a medium of amateur and artistic production in the early twentieth century whose artisanal and experimental dimensions quickly exceeded the conservatively set bounds of visuality implied by the most widely circulated stereophotographs. This chapter shows how image makers appropriated and repurposed stereoscopy to reveal binocular vision as a rupture in the act of perception.