Blogs

This Stereoscopy course is to be run again from today 13th November, for two weeks taking about 3 hours each week and can be done at a time convenient to you and at your own pace.  It is run online by Future Learn a private company wholly owned by The Open University, with the benefit of over 40 years of their experience in distance learning and online education.

Sign up to a FREE online course and discover why the stereoscope and stereo photography mesmerised Victorians when they first appeared at 1851’s Great Exhibition.

Many members of The Stereoscopic Society took part in this free on-line course on Stereoscopy in the past and found it very interesting.

You can learn by watching videos, listening to audio and reading articles. You can discuss topics with each other and educators will offer guidance and answer questions.

Some of the teaching material is supplied by Denis Pellerin of the London Stereoscopic Company with items from the Brian May collection of stereoscopic photographs.

Stereoscopic photography rapidly became a worldwide craze after the Great Exhibition of 1851. Cheap viewers and mass-produced stereographs brought startlingly vivid images within reach of a mass audience, making this the form in which most people first encountered photography – a fact largely ignored in conventional photographic history. 

Like the commercial suppliers of Magic Lantern slides, stereograph publishers offered systematic coverage of many subjects, even claiming that to ‘visit’ remote countries by stereo was better than risking the journey.

No reservations are required for this lecture. It will be run on a ‘first come, first served’ basis.
Doors will open 30 minutes before the start of the lecture.

Read more on Gresham College website

In my collection I have a group of 7 cabinet cards and cartes de visite of Japanese diplomats and students from the circle of Arthur Diosy, founder of the Japan Society. The two cabinet cards are of Katsunosuke Inoue 1861-1929 who was chargé d’affaires ad interim in Berlin in 1886 and later became the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, and his wife. . I have trouble identifying the men on the cdv's though. Four of the images are inscribed: "to Arthur Diosy" Can anyone help?

A collaboration between London College of Communication, LCC Green Week 2015, the UAL Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC) and the Museum of British Folklore, Figures of Folk explores ongoing traditions through a series of large format photographs by Graham Goldwater, of objects associated with British folklore, alongside letterpress posters created by LCC students, inspired by ancient phrases and words.

In 2009, Simon Costin, the Director of the Museum of British Folklore, put out a call to the nation’s Morris sides to replicate their team kit in miniature, as handmade dolls. . The response has been overwhelming, with nearly three hundred sides participating in the creation of a physical archive.

Together with the Morris dolls, The Museum of British Folklore owns a collection of jig dolls – articulated wooden figures, which were used by street performers to create a rhythmic beat and movement, mimicking traditional folk dance. Both collections have been photographed by Graham Goldwater, exploring the ways in which the photographic image both documents museum objects and extends their meaning and reach. Both object and photograph become an artefact of dancing and celebration which has taken place in Britain for nearly five hundred years.Folk_Figures_web_version.jpg