Traveling via Rome through the Stereoscope: Reality, Memory, and Virtual Travel

Abstract

Underwood and Underwood’s Rome through the Stereoscope of 1902 was a landmark in stereoscopic photography publishing, both as an intense, visually immersive experience and as a cognitively demanding exercise. The set consisted of a guidebook, forty-six stereographs, and five maps whose notations enabled the reader/viewer to precisely replicate the location and orientation of the photographer at each site. Combined with the extensive narrative within the guidebook, the maps and images guided its users through the city via forty-six sites, whether as an example of armchair travel or an actual travel companion. The user’s experience is examined and analyzed within the following parameters: the medium of stereoscopic photography, narrative, geographical imagination, and memory, bringing forth issues of movement, survey and route frames of reference, orientation, visualization, immersion, and primary versus secondary memories. Rome through the Stereoscope was an example of virtual travel, and the process of fusing dual images into one — stereoscopic synthesis — further demarcated the experience as a virtual environment.