VR in1859

On Photography and Stereographs - Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Atlantic (June 1859)

The Holmes Stereoscope, Artifact of the Week

Oh, infinite volumes of poems that I treasure in this small library of glass and pasteboard! I creep over the vast features of Rameses, on the face of his rock-hewn Nubian temple; I scale the huge mountain-crystal that calls itself the Pyramid of Cheops. I pace the length of the three Titanic stones of the wall of Baalbek—mightiest masses of quarried rock that man has lifted into the air; and then I dive into some mass of foliage with my microscope, and trace the veinings of a leaf so delicately wrought in the painting not made with hands, that I can almost see its down and the green aphis that sucks its juices. I look into the eyes of the caged tiger, and on the scaly train of the crocodile, stretched on the sands of the river that has mirrored a hundred dynasties. I stroll through Rhenish vineyards, I sit under Roman arches, I walk the streets of once buried cities, I look into the chasms of Alpine glaciers, and on the rush of wasteful cataracts. I pass, in a moment, from the banks of the Charles to the ford of the Jordan, and leave my outward frame in the arm-chair at my table, while in spirit I am looking down upon Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives. ...

The very things which an artist would leave out, or render imperfectly, the photograph takes infinite care with, and so makes its illusions perfect. ... 

It has fixed the most fleeting of our illusions...  The mirror with a memory. ...

The mind feels round it and gets an idea of its solidity. We clasp an object with our eyes. The mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture. ...

There is such a frightful amount of detail that we have the same sense of infinite complexity which Nature gives us. ...

Form is henceforth divorced from matter .. matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped. ...

There is only one Coliseum or Pantheon; but how many millions of potential negatives have they shed, — representatives of billions of pictures,— since they were erected! Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable. We have got the fruit of creation now and need not trouble ourselves with its core. Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth. 

The consequence of this will soon be such an enormous collection of forms that they will have to be classified and arranged in vast libraries as books are now.  The time will come when a man who wishes to see any object, natural or artificial, will go to the Imperial, National or City Stereographic Library and call for its skin or form, as he would for a book at any common library. ...

Already a workman has been traveling about the country with stereographic views of furniture, showing his employer’s patterns in this way, and taking orders for them. ...

To render comparison of similar objects or of any that we may wish to see side by side, easy, there should be a stereographic metre or fixed standard of focal length for the camera lens to furnish by its multiples of fractions, if necessary, the scale of distances and the standard of power in the stereoscope lens. In this way the eye can make the most rapid and exact comparisons. ...

The greatest of human triumphs over earthly conditions, the divorce of form and substance. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Atlantic (June 1859)