Overview
Two hundred and thirty-seven View-Master disks made by FR Lamb were acquired in 2009. These cover Christchurch and South Island scenes in the 1950s, including images of a wedding, a street parade, floral displays, small town scenes, rivers, autumn trees, and so on. They are often the sort of images that would have appeared on postcards of the time, but made with a more amateur eye.
The View-Master was invented in the USA in 1939 and consists of a plastic stereo viewer that takes circular disks with seven pairs of colour stereo images. Most View-Master disks consisted of commercially produced photographs, but a special stereo camera was marketed from 1952 which allowed anyone to create their own disks. Lamb was possibly the only person in New Zealand who did so.