Looking backward
Subtitle: a photographic portrait of the world at the beginning of the twentieth century
By: Michael Lesy
Contributors: California Museum of Photography
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 294
ISBN-13: 9780393239737
Subjects: Sources; Stereoscopic Photography; Documentary photography; Photographic industry; Modern History; Pictorial works; History
Description: "In 1900 the stereograph was king. Its three-dimensional optics created a virtual presence for the viewer. Millions of Americans, especially schoolchildren, absorbed ideas about race, class, and gender from such 3D images...Drawing on an enormous, rarely seen collection of some 300,000 stereographic views spanning the first decade of the twentieth century, Michael Lesy presents nearly 250 images displaying a riot of peoples and cultures, stark class divisions, and unsettling glimpses of daily life a century ago...Haunting views of the early twentieth century's most significant events at home and in the farthest reaches of the world-war, rebellion, industrial revolution, and natural catastrophe-flank pictures of the last remnants of the premodern natural world. Lesy's evocative essays reassert the primacy of the stereograph in American visual history. He profiles the photographers who saw the world through their prejudices and the companies that sold their images everywhere."--Dust jacket flap.
Notes: "Published in association with The California Museum of Photography"

Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Preface; title: A short history of virtual reality: being in more than one place at one time; title: The news: ten years of war and disaster; title: Society; title: The last stereograph company: Keystone View's progressive education; title: The new world and the old; title: The Middle East and the Holy Land; title: The war photographer; title: India and the Far East; title: The natural world; title: The steamer in the Fjord.