A Legacy Of Experimental Photography

Weird Photos Shot By My Grandfather

By John Potter

Among many other things my grandfather and I held in common is a love of Florida and a desire to experiment with photography.
I wanted to share this group of photos my grandfather shot from around 1948. Many are shot in Florida, although he lived in Rhode Island.

There are two types of photo here. One is simply a wide format which he mislabeled as sterescopic. The rest are sterescopic. Now sterescopic photos have been around about since photography was invented, but what my grandfather created were specifically called anaglyphs and used two images shot at about the same distance apart as human eyes and then recombined using a viewer. Kind of like the View-Master you had as a kid (if you’re as old as me). Anaglyphs were very popular from about 1850 to the 1920s. Apparently my grandfather decided to try his hand at it in the 1940s.

I cannot reproduce the effect of viewing through the anaglyph viewer literally, so what I have done is create little two frame animations out of the two frames. Each frame displays for point one second giving you an idea of the three D effect. They aren’t all great, but a good effort considering I’m relatively sure he had no proper equipment. How he shot the ones of himself must have been an interesting story. If he didn’t have someone else move the camera and re-shoot he had to use some type of mechanical device.

I hope you enjoy the photos and if you know one of the addresses please leave a comment. I’ve tried locating these places, but haven’t had any luck.

Labeled: 410-10th St. St. Cloud, FL