News

In the next S&I Media conference, Carlos Teixidor (Cultural Heritage Institute, Madrid) will present the photographs taken by Jean Laurent in Portugal in 1869. A unique opportunity to see these negatives (Lisbon, Batalha, Tomar, Coimbra, Porto, Setúbal and Évora), and screened in 3D!

Jean (or Juan) Laurent started to work as a photographer in 1856 and by 1857 he was already taking stereoscopic views. Between 1861 and 1868 he was announced as the photographer for Queen Elizabeth II of Spain. In 1869 he traveled to Portugal to obtain city views and portrait the Portuguese royal family.

All his negatives from Portugal were made with the technique of wet collodion glass plates, using a small carriage as a photographic darkroom. Most of the prints were on albumin paper, but also some on leptographic paper. The Laurent archive is preserved in the Cultural Heritage Institute in Madrid. In total there are about 12,000 negatives by Laurent and his hired photographers. Among the stereoscopic negatives (13 x 18 cm format) there are 78 views of Portugal, mainly from Lisbon, Batalha, Tomar, Coimbra, Porto, Setúbal and Évora.

Carlos Teixidor Cadenas is the curator of historical photography at the Institute of Cultural Heritage of Spain (IPCE), Ministry of Culture and Sports, in Madrid. He has published several books, such as “Photography in the Canary Islands and Madeira. The era of daguerreotype, collodion and albumen 1839-1900” and “The postcard in Spain. 1892-1915” (Espasa, 1999).

We are pleased to reveal the title, blurb and a charming stereoscopic daguerreotype of Denis Pellerin’s keynote presentation at S&I Media 2021, next June. Nude photographs in general and stereoscopic daguerreotypes in particular are very popular among collectors. These images, usually beautifully made and very nicely tinted, are greatly enhanced by the sensation of depth the stereoscope provides. The viewers could imagine themselves very close to those voluptuous ladies and so great was the illusion that it only stopped short of actually being able to touch them. But who among those who enjoy those images knows the real story behind this artistic — and occasionally pornographic — production? Most exclusively made in France in the 1850s and 1860s these daguerreotypes may have cost the buyers a small fortune but they certainly cost the majority of the photographers who took them and the models who sat for them their freedom and more often than not their reputation. Photo historian Denis Pellerin reveals some of the sad tales behind the mirror-like surfaces of these outstanding daguerreotypes. Much more than mere flesh, the persons who undressed in front of the camera were young women who were dreaming of a better life and did not always realise there was a huge price to pay for the easy money they were earning by flaunting their veil-less charms.

The International Conference on Stereo & Immersive Media is honored to announce Tom Gunning as the opening keynote speaker of its next edition with a talk entitled “3-D Images: Realistic Illusion or Perceptual Confusion?”

The presentation seeks to explore the ambiguities of the devices of stereoscopic imagery both moving and still. Since the invention of the stereoscope there has been the claim that stereoscopic images gave a more complete representation of their objects by adding an appearance of three dimensionality. However, it has also been acknowledged that stereoscopy creates merely an optical illusion of three dimensionality, one which presents its own perceptual ambiguities. Moving from the issues raised by Jonathan Crary in his discussion of stereoscopy in The Techniques of the Observer to the history 3-D films, I want to explore how the tension between an illusionist approach of fooling the senses into believing an image and an outright challenge to representation which fosters the contradictions of stereoscopic images has made 3-D a dynamic aesthetic form. I will discuss both commercial films, such as the late Transformers series, as well as avant-garde works by Godard, Ken Jacob and The OpenEnded Group (Marc Downie and Paul Kaiser).

Tom Gunning works on problems of film style and interpretation, film history and film culture. His published work has concentrated on early cinema as well as on the culture of modernity from which cinema arose. His concept of the “cinema of attractions” has tried to relate the development of cinema to other forces than storytelling, such as new experiences of space and time in modernity, and an emerging modern visual culture. The issues of film culture, the historical factors of exhibition and criticism and spectator’s experience throughout film history are recurrent themes in his work.