Still Life with Guitar and Stereo Viewer

A rival process announced at the same time as Talbot’s salted paper prints, daguerreotypes are magically precise images made on silver-plated sheets of copper sensitized with iodine and developed in mercury fumes. T. R. Williams was a gifted daguerreotypist who grew fascinated with the new science of stereography, or three-dimensional imaging that fuses together two separate two-dimensional pictures. These stereo views simulating human binocular (“two-eyed”) vision made a huge splash at the Great Exhibition in London’s Crystal Palace in 1851, when David Brewster debuted a portable version of a stereoscopic viewer, an example of which lies in front of the guitar in Williams’s still life. Following that exhibition, in the 1850s Williams opened several London studios focusing on stereo portraits, landscapes, and artistic compositions and entered into a contract with the London Stereoscopic Company to mass-produce his views. Whether as daguerreotypes or sturdier paper prints, his stereos delighted audiences with their incredible realism a century before 3-D movies.