PICTORIAL STEREOGRAPHY 145stereo is the photographic medium par excellence for genuinely
abstract presentations.
The stereo abstraction may be a wholly normal subject, given
a definite atmosphere through considered treatment. Another,
although using a normal original, attains a fantastic appearance
through pseudoscopy. Then too, there is a third type which is
purely abstract and is achieved by making a stereogram of an
original which never existed in the form reproduced. For example
a moving point of light is registered as a continuous line. But let
us consider a typical example of the first type.
The subject, a dead tree, fallen, with white limbs reaching
toward the sky from the surface of a river. Not so much of a
subject perhaps, but treatment made the picture. The stereo-
gram was made at night with flash. There is no light in the pic-
ture, no reflections from water or background, only those gaunt,
ghostly limbs stretching upward. Nor was there the safe haven of
the artificiality of paper, the thing was real, with all of its atmos-
phere of fantasy, of obscure premonition, of the atmosphere of
death. It was only a few dead branches, inanimate, yet that picture
carries more suggestion of terror than any I ever saw upon a plane
surface. It is simply a stereogram of intangible atmosphere. We
have seen three such stereograms by three different pictorialists.
All were highly effective.
But now to the second type, what we might call, and with very
good reason, the stereo surrealist school. The technique is ab-
surdly simple, the absence of transposition, pseudoscopic view-
ing. It is a trick often used to make “puzzle pictures,” it has been
used repeatedly to emhapsize the form of certain objects, but
when the method is combined with a nice discrimination of form
and color, the inversion of relief causes such a change that the
subject is not only unrecognizable, it can often not be recognized
when its identity is known. Yes, it is the simple shifting of eleva-
tion and depression into their reverse phases. The result is in
effect a pure abstraction. There is not only color without apparent
cause, just color valuable for its effect alone, but there is that
which no painter of the abstract has even dreamed of achieving,
a definite pattern of relief which is as detached from reality as is
the color. This, too, has been used by many stereographers with
a wide variety of subjects. (See Chapter 16).