Oliver Wendall Holmes' The Stereoscope and Stereoscopic Photographs was first published in 1898. An editor's preface makes it clear that the purpose of the book is to de-bunk popular notions that the stereoscope was nothing more than an amusing toy, and to instruct the public in its appreciation and correct use.
Although Holmes deals at some length with theories of vision, this "correctness" has nothing to do with the technical alignment of stereograph, stereoscope and viewer so as to produce the desired three dimensional effect, rather, it is an instruction on how to look so as to make the most of the multiple sets of meanings available from the optical field.
The text is laden with Holmes' own pleasurable experiences of stereoscopic engagements. These are primarily generated by the detachment of consciousness from the external viewing position to wander freely "inside" the optical field, "the mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture," (21) where "incidental" discoveries are unearthed. These incidentals quickly assume a greater importance than what is sometimes called the "preferred meaning" of the text: "This distinctiveness of the lesser details of a building or a landscape often gives us incidental truths which interest us more than the central object of the picture." (23) The detachment of eyes and consciousness from the viewing body to roam freely inside the pictorial field, thus over-riding compositional or perspectival directions is regarded, by Holmes, as a liberating experience. This line of thought runs contrary to most versions of psychoanalytic film theory, where a similar inside position is often thought of as entrapment within a field of preferred meanings.
In what, at first glance, appears to be a suprisingly post-modern sentiment, Holmes claims, for the stereoscope, a total dominance of form over content, or matter.
Form is henceforth divorced from matter [editor's italics]. In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mold on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it. Pull it down or burn it up, if you please (27).
But this apparently Boudrillardian affirmation of the priority of the representation over the object or event in reality is not what it seems. While accepting that the stereoscopic view is an illusion, Holmes nevertheless assumes that photography is "a mirror with a memory." [editor's italics] (9) Like the anonymous author of "The Stereoscope, Pseudoscope and Solid Daguerreotypes," Holmes takes the truthful quality of photography to be indispensable to the functioning of the stereoscope. When the viewer looked at a stereoscopic view, he or she was looking at a perfectly true replica of reality itself. Only this justifies the "pulling down or burning" of the object in reality once recorded by stereography.
Holmes noted three essential qualities which allowed the necessary mental detachment and the truthfulness of the stereoscopic representation. They are:
2) The stereoscope renders objects as large as they appear in nature
3) The photographic stereograph renders fine detail visible.
