[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.