The University of Sydney - Sydney University Museums

Media Release March 2003

The Macleay Museum at the University of Sydney presents

Virtual Empire: Stereo Photography in Britain and Australia 1851-1879

Opening on 20 March Virtual Empire is the Macleay Museum’s major exhibition for 2003. Two multiple-image viewers give visitors the opportunity of seeing the work of some of the most famous nineteenth-century photographers as they intended them to be seen, in 3D. The viewers will also allow visitors to step back to 1860 and see some of the earliest photographs of the streets of Sydney in 3D.

In the 1850s, long before the DVD, the cinema, and the telephone, millions of stereo photographs opened up a virtual world to the British and Australian public. For outdoor scenes the stereoscopic camera taking two small pictures revolutionized photography in the mid Victorian era, just as the miniature camera did in the twentieth century.

Stereo photographs could be hired overnight or bought for a shilling, giving many their first glimpse of an empire previously only etched on paper or painted on canvas. While stereo photography was hugely popular in the nineteenth century, historians have largely ignored the stereo format.

All the photographs in Virtual Empire are from the Macleay Museum’s Historic Photograph Collection (with two exceptions). William England, Roger Fenton, Robert Howlett and George Washington Wilson are among the internationally famous photographers represented in Virtual Empire but few will previously have seen their works in 3D. Other images by Australian amateurs, such as Robert Hunt, have never before been displayed in 3D.

Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt for cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth … The time will come when a man who wishes to see any object, natural or artificial, will go to the Imperial, National, or City Stereoscopic Library, and call for its skin or form, as he would for a book in any common library.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1864

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Phone: 61-2-9351 4200
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