historyThe Public Domain Review1896-1919 · Palestine
Stereoscope cards turned Ottoman Palestine into 3D for armchair pilgrims
Around 1900, millions of Americans and Europeans looked at the Holy Land through a stereoscope, a viewer that merges two photographs into a 3D image. Companies like Keystone View and the American Colony in Jerusalem sold thousands of cards, mostly of biblical sites, and the Bible was one of the few books outranked only by Palestine travel books in sales. Yet the cards also caught everyday life in Ottoman Palestine, where about three quarters of some half a million people were farmers in over 700 villages, and olives, cotton, sesame and Jaffa oranges were exported. Women ground coffee and baked bread, and people of many faiths lived side by side.
A stereograph pairs two photos taken a few centimetres apart; viewed through lenses, each eye sees one, and the brain combines them into depth.
Because the photographers chose scenes that fed a Western fascination, the images show both a real society and the lens of the people who sold them, so they must be read with that in mind.
Photographs of faraway places have often reflected their audience's expectations as much as the places themselves, a pattern seen in colonial-era travel photography worldwide.
The stereoscope was a 19th-century craze: many Victorian homes had one, and a card set could take families to places they would never visit.
Image: The Public Domain Review
