Indiana in Stereo
Indiana Historical Society Press $34.95

 

You remember the View-Master. And those plastic contraptions you looked through to see glowing 3-D pictures of Woody Woodpecker, Mount Rushmore or an Everglades alligator are still popular with kids today. But the View-Master’s innovative predecessor, the stereoscope, is likely a far less familiar gadget. A new book from the Indiana Historical Society Press called Indiana in Stereo ($34.95) will bring you up to speed on the stereoscope phenomenon — this was the TV of the Victorian era — while showing you hundreds of gorgeous Hoosier-related stereoscope pictures.

 

The book, edited by George Hanlin and Paula Corpuz, starts as a brief history of the stereoscope and of Indiana’s early and current photographers working with this technology that uses the human eyes’ binocular vision to make twin flat images placed next to each other appear three-dimensional.

 

While a pair of historic essays are enlightening, the real fun is looking at the pictures through the included mini viewer, which works passably on some of the more faded photos and exceptionally well with certain high-contrast black and white and, later in the book, color images.

 

The older pictures range from outdoor Southern Indiana scenes, to a brick factory that produced a cure for opium addiction, to flood-destroyed towns, to the long-gone Marion County Courthouse, to a woman named Edith hanging out on a Muncie natural gas well. Each photo comes with a caption with its date and whatever historical detail was available. My favorite: “Men inspecting young chickens, Blackford County, 1910.”

 

The best of the older pictures work with the three-dimensional perspectives. One picture of a man in a bowler hat and black coat walking past the Marion County Library in 1905 is especially eye catching. He looks alive standing there in the dirty street.

 

In a smart and bold move for a historical publication, the editors chose to include photos by a contemporary photographer working in stereo. Darryl Jones’ vivid color pictures from natural and historic Indiana spots end the book in a great way. He is especially conscious of framing his pictures to play with the depth perception of 3-D. What would be a somewhat dry picture of writer George Ade’s Hazelden study comes alive in stereo as we look through the study door and down the hallway.