Before television, before radio, before motion pictures, people entertained themselves by looking at stereograms, better known today as 3D pictures. The most successful of the companies selling 3D images and viewers (Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes invented a stereogram viewer that is still used to this day) was the Keystone View Company, which sold millions of prints of 3D images taken all around the world.
The company’s archive now belongs to the University of California system and many of the original glass prints have been digitized.
Among those images are some stereograms that were taken in pre-state Palestine. Not all are dated but the ones that are dated say 1903 and I believe that’s when all of them were shot.
They are of Jews from the old yishuv, those Jews who had lived in the land of Israel since before the rise of modern political Zionism.
There are images at the kotel, the Western Wall, Sephardi sofrim, ritual scribes, and Jews selling and buying lulaving and etroging (palm fronds and citrons) for the festival of Sukkot.
I’m displaying them here in a universal stereo format. Standard side-by-side images are at the top and cross-eye pairs are below. You can view the cross-eye pairs without a viewer just like you would view those “magic” posters that were popular a few years back. Cross your eyes and move your head back from the screen until a third image fuses in the middle, like when you use binoculars.
View Master is exactly where my mind went. That and my collection of kids stuff disappeared when I went to college.
These are fascinating and a wonderful capture of culture at the time. The fashion and practices. Need to see if the collection is available to view online.
These are very moving. Thank you.
And now I'm shopping eBay for a Bakelite View-Master. Look, a squirrel.