Keep the Map Open

The general map was number seven, and it belonged at the back of the book. This was a practical arrangement: the reader could leave it unfolded while consulting the smaller maps elsewhere in the volume. A journey through the Holy Land required a continuing sense of direction, even when its traveller remained at home.

The American photographic publisher Underwood & Underwood introduced its hundred-view tour in 1900. Alongside the stereoscopic photographs came maps and a guide by Jesse Lyman Hurlbut, a Methodist educator and author of Sunday-school literature. His book took charge of the journey with the confidence of a personal guide. The 1905 edition calls its contents “positions taken”.

Hurlbut wanted readers to treat each position as a place they were visiting. He supplied a geographical route rather than a chronological march through the Bible, so he also asked them to keep the sequence of biblical events separately in mind. The landscape was contemporary Ottoman Palestine. The purpose of the visit was to make a Christian sacred history feel geographically real.

At the first position, the map put the observer offshore at Jaffa. Two red lines branched from a point in the Mediterranean towards the town. They represented the limits of the camera’s view, looking east from a ship. Hurlbut’s prose supplied an arrival: a customs boat approaching, passengers and luggage to be rowed ashore, the town rising beyond the water.

An Underwood card issued in 1901 preserves this opening view. The near side of a ship occupies the foreground, with chains running diagonally across the water. A rowing boat lies between the vessel and the waterfront. The same arrangement appears twice, with small differences between the two perspectives.

Two views for two eyes

Those differences were the useful part. Each eye normally looks at the world from its own position. A nearby object shifts more against its background between the two views than a distant one does. The visual system can use that disparity, alongside other cues, to perceive depth. A stereoscopic photograph records two suitably separated viewpoints; a viewer presents the appropriate picture to each eye.

The instrument therefore needed two different pictures. Enlarging one photograph and showing an identical copy to each eye would not supply the missing difference in viewpoint. In the Jaffa pair, the near chains and ship’s fittings occupy different positions against the distant town. The camera had preserved spatial information which an ordinary single print could not give both eyes.

Charles Wheatstone investigated this principle with drawings. In the paper he presented to the Royal Society in June 1838, the professor at King’s College London described a stereoscope built around two mirrors meeting at a right angle. The pictures stood on adjustable boards to the sides. Each eye looked into its own mirror, receiving the reflection of the corresponding drawing.

A wooden screw with right- and left-handed threads moved the two supports together or apart while keeping their distances from the centre equal. Separate sliding panels allowed the pictures to be aligned. This was an experimental apparatus, with room to adjust the relationship between the eyes and the images.

Wheatstone deliberately used outline figures without shading or colour. Cubes, cones and simpler arrangements of lines could acquire apparent relief from the two projections alone. Leaving out the other pictorial aids made it harder to attribute the result to an artist’s skilful shadows. Photography was not necessary for that experiment; it later supplied a vast range of detailed subjects for the same principle.

David Brewster’s lenticular stereoscope offered a more compact arrangement. Lenses directed the two views to the eyes and magnified them, with the pictures placed together in front rather than on opposite sides of a mirror apparatus. The blackened box illustrated in his 1856 book had adjustable eye tubes and a lid which admitted light to an opaque print. Transparent pictures could instead be illuminated from behind.

Instrument makers gave these designs their material forms. Jules Duboscq manufactured Brewster-type viewers in Paris; a surviving example is dated about 1853. Brewster also illustrated open forms made by Duboscq.

Adjust the carrier

The later handheld form made the practical instructions in Hurlbut’s book readily intelligible. Two lenses sat behind a hood which fitted against the face. A divider kept the eyes’ views separate, while a crosspiece held the stereocard on a projecting shaft. Sliding that carrier nearer or farther brought the photograph into sharp focus. The open construction allowed light to fall on the print.

The Milan museum’s example, made between 1900 and 1910, has a wooden frame, a decorated metal mask edged with velvet and clips for holding the card. Its central partition runs back from between the lenses towards the card support. It is a later Holmes-type viewer, distinct from both Wheatstone’s side mirrors and Brewster’s enclosed box.

Hurlbut told the user to find the best light for the photograph and hold the hood firmly against the forehead, excluding surrounding light from the eyes. He then warned against the greatest mistake: moving through the positions too quickly. Each outlook needed study. The photographs were the principal text, he argued; his words were a supplement to what the reader could see.

Brewster had noted another delay in 1856: some new users initially saw two pictures and needed practice before they could unite them.

A closer look · 1:34 · English · automatic captions

Two viewpoints, one impression of depth

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Keeping the bearings

The map did a job the lenses could not. A stereocard could present the depth of a street or courtyard without telling the observer which way it faced, where it stood in relation to the next view or how much territory lay outside the frame.

Underwood’s map system gave each photograph a numbered position. The point from which two lines branched marked the camera’s location; the lines marked the scene’s left and right limits. Route arrows connected places, while red rectangles directed the reader to sectional maps at a larger scale. At Jaffa, the offshore point and its eastward spread put a specific observer in relation to the coast.

Hurlbut asked even readers familiar with the country to consult these maps. Knowing the name of a town did not establish the position of a particular camera.

His larger promise went well beyond identifying a viewpoint. He argued that the stereographs could affect and teach the user much as the places themselves would. The hood helped concentrate attention by shutting out the immediate room. His imagined traveller could look into a life-size space beyond the card, rather than merely inspect a small print held in the hand.

He acknowledged limits. This set did not supply movement or colour. The sense of being located in the scene might last only seconds, and its intensity could vary. Nevertheless, he insisted that the resulting experiences were real experiences of seeing Palestine. That was the guide’s argument for his product, rather than a record of how every purchaser responded.

A house and a history

The words also directed the use of the contemporary landscape. At Jaffa’s market, Hurlbut suggested that removing the people in partly European dress from consideration would help the viewer imagine an apostolic crowd. He wanted the reader to move mentally from the present into a biblical past. The people photographed in the town were being made to serve that imaginative exercise.

The third position offered the house traditionally associated with Simon the Tanner, where the Apostle Peter was said to have stayed. Hurlbut anticipated a reasonable question: was this really the same building? He admitted that few buildings still standing could be two thousand years old. His case concerned the supposed site and a resemblance he believed the present house bore to an ancient one.

He then appealed to a “changeless East”, treating later building customs as evidence for a much earlier setting. The stereograph could make a courtyard’s stairs, well and surrounding walls appear spatially convincing. It could not establish that Peter had stood there. The book’s traditional identification and its historical imagination had to supply that connection.

An Underwood printing from 1903 preserves the view: people gathered around a well, a staircase rising behind them and foliage above the court. The publisher placed it in more than one sequence.

Underwood expected its salesmen to understand the educational argument as well as demonstrate the optical effect. Instructions quoted by Princeton’s Graphic Arts Collection tell agents to possess and study Hurlbut’s book, carry its introduction and ponder it. Amusement alone, the company argued, left much of the stereograph’s selling potential unused. The agent was supposed to arrive at a conscientious belief in the pictures’ value as places to learn from.

The Simon-house card could be fitted to another such course. It carries number 3 on its face, matching the house’s place in the Holy Land tour. Turn it over and it becomes “Position 13—Travel Studies on Apostolic Heroes”. Below that new position, the six translated titles offer the same courtyard to readers of six languages.