Tag: Stereographs

A Collection of Stereographs

Posted on By Tom No Comments on A Collection of Stereographs
History and Genealogy, Photography

Stereogram Cards I finally got my hands on an actual set of antique stereograph cards.  This is a collection of 32 cards by the H. C. White Company, and includes scenes from Havana, Cuba, Manila in the Philippines, several other interesting locations.  There are also some humorous staged scenes included in the lot.  These are all polychrome color cards, and have the copyright date of 1905 on them. I found some of the subject matter fascinating.  This shot of the beach at Atlantic City is a far cry from today’s image of Jersey Shore…

11 In Surf Sand and Sun Atlantic City

If you look closely at the individual in the foreground, you’ll see that it’s a man and not a woman. He’s just wearing a weird yellow hat.

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Stereograph Collections

Posted on By Tom 1 Comment on Stereograph Collections
EdTech, History and Genealogy, Photography

stereograph

I think I mentioned that while growing up we had an old stereographic viewer and collection of stereograph cards as seen above. I used to love playing with it, and it seemed like we had quite the collection. While I was still on this 3D kick I decided to check to see if there were other collections online besides the one I found at the University of South Carolina Library. It turns out that there are an AMAZING number of images available online, if you know where to look.

The first thing I did was just a simple Google Image Search for the term “stereograph.” That turned up lots of interesting hits, and some potential sources for more images. It looked like a good many of these led back to the Library of Congress, and that’s where I hit paydirt.

My first search on the Library of Congress’s site led me to the Robert N. Dennis Collection, now housed at the New York Public Library. The stereographic images in the University of South Carolina’s online collection are from this collection. Dennis was not a photographer, but a collector, and he amassed a huge collection of these image cards. Many of these depict life in small-town America, but the collection itself spans the US and includes some European shots. Dennis donated these to the library in two batches, first in the 1930’s and later in the 1950’s. The collection consists of about 72,000 stereograph cards, of which a little over 12,000 have since been digitized and placed online.

The online Dennis Collection can be browsed by state, so I was curious to see what was available for South Carolina in addition to those I had already seen. I was surprised to see that there were several images of Greenville, including one for Reedy Falls and one of the old Furman campus and Belltower.

Reedy FallsFurman

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