Category: Photography, Louisville, United States
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DIGITAL COLLECTIONS About Stereographs A stereograph, also known as a stereogram or stereo view, is a double photograph that appears three-dimensional when viewed through a stereoscope. Scientist Charles Wheatstone invented a reflecting stereoscope in 1838 as a laboratory instrument. Some photographers did use this instrument to exhibit photographs, but it was not until the development of the lenticular stereoscope in 1850 by Sir William Brewster that stereographs became popular. They reached their height of popularity between 1870 and 1890 but continued to be created until as late as 1940. The term "stereograph" is said to have originated with Oliver Wendell Holmes who, in addition to being an author, poet, physician, and lecturer, invented a hand stereoscope in 1859.
DIGITAL COLLECTIONS About the Collection The Royal Photo Company Collection contains 14,817 photographic negatives from the Royal Photo Company taken between 1937 and 1973 in and around Louisville, Kentucky. Most of the negatives are 8 x 10-inch safety negatives. Also included are approximately 180 photographic prints given to Aaron Chase by the Royal Photo Company. These prints are "before" and "after" images from the 1960s of buildings undergoing exterior renovations by the Louisville Perma Stone Company. Louis Bramson established the Royal Photo View Company in Louisville in 1904, but many of the glass negatives were apparently sold when the company moved to a new second-floor location on West Jefferson Street in 1937.
DIGITAL COLLECTIONS About the Collection The Furnas Family Album (circa 1887 -1910) Collection consists of 365 images, most of which were captured with a 4 x 5 camera. The collection provides a unique, sentimental, and sometimes humorous view into the lives of members and friends of the Furnas family of Louisville, Kentucky, in the early 1900s. In addition to photographs of the family at their home and in rural Marion County, Indiana, it features scenes of Louisville (including local parks, buildings, monuments, and steamboats on the Ohio River) and travels west (to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri and as far as Spokane, Washington). Walton Furnas co-owned Furnas & Maddox Photographic and Stereoscopic Supplies in Louisville, Kentucky.
DIGITAL COLLECTIONS About the Collection In 1903 James Caufield and Frank W. Shook founded the eponymous photography studio in Louisville, Kentucky. Will Bowers later joined the firm as a partner and chief photographer. Few aspects of life in Louisville escaped the lens of Caufield & Shook, whose company motto was "We photograph ANYTHING, day or night." The collection includes work for Louisville architects, builders, banks and financial houses, wholesale and retail merchants, advertisers, government agencies, public utilities, and private individuals. In 1924 Caufield and Shook became the official photographer of the Kentucky Derby. The firm was sold to Richard N. Duncan and Ned Tanselle in 1960 and went out of business in 1978.
