Stereoscopic Photography
Makes a Comeback at
Angry Fairy One Night Only

What: The Glass Bed at the Bottom of a Lake,
a 3-D Stereoscopic Presentation by Stephen Hamilton
With live music by Recognizer Various, Skip von Kuske and DJ Mike Dibiase

When: Friday, May 21st. Showings at 8:00, 9:00, 10:00 and 11:00 p.m.

Where: Angry Fairy Gallery is at 625 NW Everett #107 (between NW Broadway and 6th Ave.), Portland

Contact: Kim Hutchins at 503.224.5769 or kimmie@angry-fairy.com.

Remember that little red ViewFinder you loved as a kid? Back then, you didn’t need to know the ten-dollar word for the 3-D pictures that kept your eyes glued to the plastic toy, with its changeable discs of images. You just knew it was mesmerizing—and very, very cool.
But if you want to know that ten-dollar word (or words) now, it’s called “stereoscopic photography” – and it’s on display at Angry Fairy Gallery for one night only.

On Friday, May 21st, Angry Fairy Gallery invites you to relive your childhood love of pictures that pop to life and explore the potential of contemporary stereoscopics with a slide presentation by local artist Stephen Hamilton. This isn’t some boring college lecture slideshow; Angry Fairy knows how to throw a party! Hamilton’s startlingly eerie, evocative images will be accompanied by live musicians and DJs, and served up with house wine, all for a meager $5 cover.

Stereoscopic photography became popular in Victorian times, when collecting the eye-crossing, dual images—sometimes called stereograms or stereographs— fell into fashion in mostly highbrow circles, with aficionados ranging from Pope Benedict XV to the Nazi party. Stereoscopic photography resurfaced in the 1950’s, when affordable stereoscopic cameras like Stereo Realist and Kodak Stereo made the medium accessible to the everyman (and woman), and everything old became new again.

Hamilton says his contemporary approach to stereoscopic photography is “inspired by a search for the best qualities in people, in life—and the sadness that results from the gulf between that and the way life usually operates.” His photographs have a distinctive, Art Noveau influence and an ethereal, painterly sensibility. His visual narratives are captivatingly strange, even disturbing, like one black and white photo of a woman’s face with only one eye in focus and a dead fish clasped to her breast.

Hamilton, who received his BFA from the University of Utah, makes his photographs with a vintage, double-lensed camera, then projects them using a special two-lensed projector. The dual-lens process mimics the way the human eye sees, creating an illusion of depth. However, it’s not the way people see that fascinates Hamilton, but the way they perceive and feel. “I dislike the stark realism of much photography,” Hamilton says, “I want to take pictures the way people remember something or dream something, rather than the way we see something.”