item details
Overview
This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025) on page 59.
Just what sort of backyard comedy hijinks the people in this photograph are getting up to, or who they are, is unknown. Its most delightful characteristic, however, can’t be reproduced in the pages of a book. The photographer, FR Lamb, used a stereo camera to produce a pair of colour slides. Viewed through a View-Master’s binocular eyepiece, the twin images snap into super-real 3-D. The View-Master was introduced in 1939 and is still being manufactured today. While many of us would have been raised on commercially produced reels of cartoon characters and scenic wonders, Lamb’s stereo kit allowed him to make his own cardboard discs. He was probably one of only a few New Zealanders to do so.