Among the oldest toys still in production, there is one in particular that remains solidified in my childhood memories. The nifty gadget, which proved popular among children and adults alike, went through multiple iterations, but up until the mid-2010s its design had stayed more or less the same. Though originally created in 1939, many Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials would equally recognize the toy’s iconic red plastic shell, which houses a binocular back piece and two filtered lenses at the front, as well as a disk holder where a white disk lined with celluloid squares could be loaded into the slot. Peering through the viewfinder — and with a pull of a side lever — one could see a reel of pictures that appeared and changed like magic. In case you haven’t guessed by now, that toy I’m talking about is the timeless View-Master.

Behind this visual wonder, however, lies a technological innovation that actually predates the toy by more than a century — the stereoscope.¹ Invented in the 1830s by English scientist Charles Wheatstone, a stereoscope is an optical device that can create the illusion of depth,² which is achieved when two nearly identical images mounted on cardstock (known as a stereograph or stereogram) are viewed simultaneously through the device’s pair of ocular lenses. The result is a three-dimensional image, akin to the one produced by a View-Master.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, stereoscopy contributed much to the understanding of science, medicine, anthropology, and metaphysics in Europe and the United States. Together these fields were under the domain of progress, a concept that was once exclusively applied to the Western world.³  In effect, the stereoscope was a tool of “progress” that — like our View-Master — enabled the unknown and unknowable to come into being. This instrument and medium of progress along with its contentious role in shaping and imparting knowledge became the foci for The Optics of Science, the latest exhibition at the Image Centre in Toronto.

Over 100 objects from the nineteenth and twentieth century are on display, which come from the former collection of Gail Silverman Bass and the late Dr. Martin J. Bass. The modestly sized assortment of stereoscopes, stereographs, monographs, and memorabilia guides visitors through the exhibition’s six thematic areas: “Out of this World”, “The Hunt”, “Capturing the Field”, “Signs & Symptoms”, “The Act of Looking”, and “Stereoscopes”. Behind glass, these objects look conventionally staged, but despite their historical and fragile nature, the exhibition surprisingly encourages some level of interaction with them. A podium to the right of the gallery’s entrance provides magnifiers and 3-D viewers to use, a practical addition that allows visitors to experience the small stereographs up close.

The stereograph Full Moon (ca. 1870), a well-preserved example of nineteenth-century astrophotography, introduces the theme of otherworldliness in “Out of this World”. The original photos were taken in 1863 by Henry Draper, an American physician and the son of J.W. Draper, who was the first person to photograph the full moon in 1840. Apparently, both Draper’s photographs are two of the most detailed lunar images from the 1800s,⁴ an impressive feat at the time since photography was only a few decades old when Henry Draper’s photo was taken. From there, it would take another century or so for the first humans to reach and photograph the surface of the moon.

In medicine, stereography was used to identify and document pathologies of the human body (e.g. smallpox, tumours, retinal diseases), with some even using photos of real but anonymous patients.⁵ Many of these stereographs were compiled and published in medical compendiums, such as the three volumed Diagnostics of The Fundus Oculi (1916) and the ten volumed Edinburgh University Stereoscopic Atlas of Anatomy (ca. 1905–11), both of which are on display in a glass case. Though these medical and clinical breakthroughs were — and still are — undoubtedly fascinating, most do not acknowledge that the socio-political treatment of people inflicted with illness was generally quite poor at the time, largely because of the negative connotations around disease, disorder, and disability in Western societies.⁶ ⁷ Sadly, many of these normative and ableist perceptions⁸ would foreshadow pseudoscientific beliefs, namely eugenics and social Darwinism, that further legitimized progress through hierarchized models of human populations.

The exhibition’s thematic transition from scientific inquiry to speculation and determinism is quite poignant as the stereographical content moves away from innocuous observations of the world towards “universal knowledge” framed by, and mainly for, the West. “The Hunt” and “Capturing the Field” vividly evoke this shift through stereographs that — unlike their counterparts in astronomy and medicine — contain texts devoid of impartialities. And interestingly, all the stereographs in this part of the exhibition pertain to representations of the non-Western world. Among them, one stereograph particularly stands out: based on its brief caption, it depicts a group of Chinese individuals under the influence of opium. What is unapparent to the viewer, however, is the context behind the image’s mere performativity. Historically, this is a somber reminder of China’s own opiate crisis during the mid-nineteenth century, brought upon by Great Britain’s goal to unethically expand trade in East Asia, which involved exporting vast amounts of opium from British India to the Qing Dynasty, inducing widespread addiction across the region. Apart from omitting this crucial information, there is an unsettling element about the stereograph, not because it strangely shows two of the six figures lying dormant — a likely side effect of the substance — but rather, it is the intrusiveness of looking at them when their sensory and cognitive abilities have been presumably impaired.

These stereographs in The Optics of Science reveal that progress and knowledge are two sides of the same coin: Western ideas of progress were projected onto the Other, including those within and outside the confines of the West; as a consequence, one-dimensional “knowledge” about the Other was constructed that, in turn, served as veneers of objectivity to be consumed and circulated among Western audiences. The Optics of Science does a satisfactory job of striking a balance between being a historical and contemporary exhibition that both recognizes and interrogates the historical significance of stereoscopy and the institutions it informed. However, where the exhibition falls short is the presentation of stereographs with additional content on their backsides, which for the most part is not visible. An alternative format could have involved printing and displaying the back text on separate labels — this hidden information is certainly beneficial as it further contextualizes the objects while also highlighting their once didactical impacts on viewers centuries ago.

Works Cited

1. Lisa Spiro, History through the Stereoscope: Stereoscopy and Virtual Travel. (OpenStaxCNX, 2007), http://cnx.org/contents/a0c8da0d-2094-4828-8ae5-1e48d507d4d6@3.2.

2. Vannadil, Harikrishnan, and Peter W. Mortensen. “Stereopsis and Tests for Stereopsis.” Edited by Danah Albreiki, EyeWiki, American Academy of Ophthalmology, 2 Apr. 2018, https://eyewiki.aao.org/Stereopsis_and_Tests_for_Stereopsis.

3. Margaret Meek Lange, “Progress,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford University, February 17, 2011), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/progress/.

4. Erica Fahr Campbell, “The First Photograph of the Moon,” Time (Time, December 20, 2013), https://time.com/3805947/the-first-photograph-of-the-moon/.

5. “Signs and Symptoms: The Purposes and Uses of Clinical and Medical Stereographs,” The Optics of Science, Edited by Shannon Anderson (Toronto: The Image Centre, 2022), 39-54, Exhibition catalogue.

6. John Duffy, “Social impact of disease in the late nineteenth century.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine vol. 47, 7 (1971): 797-810.

7. Irmo Marini and Mark A. Stebnicki, eds. The Psychological and Social Impact of Illness and Disability (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 2012), ProQuest Ebook Central.

8. Irmo Marini, Noreen M. Glover-Graf, and Michael Jay Millington, Psychosocial Aspects of Disability: Insider Perspectives and Counseling Strategies (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1891/9780826180636.