WORLD OF STEREOGRAPHS

Picture a photograph so huge, you can’t find its perimeters by rolling your eyes around an imaginary 360-degree circle. Got to be IMAX, or a similarly massive creation made from the mix of art and technology, right?

Wrong.

It’s the stereograph, a popular 19th-Century invention which, when spied through an inexpensive hand-held viewer, completely occupied one’s visual space--yet hardly required a giant movie house to use.

“Stereographs were visitors to the hearth and home and the Victorian Parlor,” said Ed Earle, curator at the California Museum of Photography, “and every home could have one.” A collection of 200 stereographs, stereographic cameras and viewers is on exhibit at the museum at UC Riverside to Aug. 24.

“Return to Eldorado: A Century of California Stereographs” chronicles the history of stereography in the state from the 1850s gold rush to the 1950s post World War II economic boom.

The exhibit’s sepia-toned stereographs, slightly larger than post cards, also bring to 3-D illusionary life the spectrum of state history, society and landscape from San Diego to Eureka. A view of Dutch Flats, a dusty, impoverished mining town inhabited by hardened gold diggers, provides contrast to a serene scene of socialites at a croquet garden party in Stockton.

“This exhibit depicts California as an ideal for the rest of the American populous,” which received the stereographs through mass production and nationwide distribution, Earle said.

“What was photographed and sent around the country, particularly to the East Coast, was the gold mines, the boundless agriculture, the grand hotels and impressive oil derricks. So the stereograph embellished the myth of California as an Eldorado--a golden place, a land of wealth and richness.

“However, at the same time, we see lots of small-town photographers examining their own culture and photographing transient mining towns in the midst of growing pains. So we see the co-mingling of the East Coast’s fantasy perception versus the very palpable reality of California.”

Stereographs are made with double-lens cameras that produce two slightly different images of an identical scene. Those images fuse as one and create an illusion of depth when mounted side by side and viewed through a stereoscope--provided for museum visitors.

The first stereograph photographers were individual practitioners “eking out a living as small-town photographers,” Earle said. Later, distribution firms, known as publishers, began to mass-produce the images, and their popularity began to flourish after the transcontinental railroad opened in 1869.

A growing tourism trade propped up the stereographs’ popularity, which hit a peak with the middle class during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dropping prices helped too. By the turn of the century, Sears, Roebuck & Co. could offer 100 stereographs for about 80 cents, Earle said.

The largest stereographic publisher and manufacturer was the Keystone View company, which thrived from 1892 through the 1930s. The archive of the company is represented by the 350,000-piece Keystone-Mast Collection, now owned by the California Museum of Photography.

The cameras in the museum’s show are part of that collection, but most of the stereographs on view belong to Peter Palmquist.

Palmquist is a professional photographer and photography historian specializing in 19th-Century California who co-curated the exhibit with Earle.

He will discuss what he learned spending seven years collecting images for “Eldorado” (his total collection includes 50,000 photographs, 7,000 of those stereographs) at the National Stereoscopic Assn. convention, to be held at the UC Riverside museum, June 27-29.

“I learned a lot about public taste, for instance,” he said by phone from his home in Arcata, Calif. “And I have to say it was not particularly high. The stereographs that seem to be in the most abundance are often the most dull of dull.

“I suspect that was probably a matter of economics. The stereographic photographers tended to want to get a good financial return for their efforts, but the publishers wanted to buy their negatives cheaply.”

So photographers began to filch, he said. But wary of being caught, they stole from lesser-known, less imaginative or adventurous photographers, rather than outstanding, well-known and easily recognizable ones.

“Thus, over and over we see a bland stereograph published by everybody--a Boston firm, a New York pirate, or the Quaker Oats Co., which would offer it free with their cereal. So there are some dull things in the exhibit, as well as exciting things. You get a cross section; I didn’t just concentrate on the most exotic.”

Exotic is perhaps the word though, for a group of images that Earle said are among his favorites in the exhibit.

Mums, white lilies and other delicate flora cover ornately shaped floats--one looks like a sail boat, another like a slipper--in a 1887 series titled “Ladies’ Flower Festival.”

“The series is one of the quirkiest things in the show,” said Earle with a smile. “Yet the fact that several pictures of it were taken suggests that such a festival was really important to people, and it shows us how refined and developed folks were years ago. It was quite intriguing to see this whole series on this funny little event.”