INTRODUCTION

We have all dreamed of the past while looking at old photographs, postcards or illustrations of life in Manila at the turn of the century. But to look at a stereoview of Escolta in 1899 through a stereoviewer is a totally different experience. Suddenly you are in the street, you feel that you can just step in and talk to the gentleman in the white suit or hail a calesa. 
Or you can marvel at the forest of masts across a clean and beautiful Pasig River, where children swim and carabaos wallow. The guns of American soldiers look real and sometimes frightening.

Stereoviews were taken with a special stereoscopic camera, equipped with two lenses that take two shots simultaneously, much like two human eyes watching the scene. He two photographs were then developed, printed and pasted side by side on a hard curved cardboard mount. A stereoviewer is used so that each eye sees of the two different pictures, simulating human stereoscopic vision, with a striking three-dimensional effect.

Stereoviews were very popular in the United Stated and in Europe from the 1850s until the 1930s, with a peak in popularity around the turn of the century. The marked increase in popularity of stereoviews at the time was stimulated by several historical events such as the Boer War, the assassination of President McKinley, the Boxer rebellion and the Russo-Japanese War. However, the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection were undoubtedly among the major contributors of the growing enthusiasm of the American public for stereoviews. People were gathering in their living rooms or in public arcades for trips around the world through stereoviews. They indeed were the television of the nineteenth century.

I estimate that about 2000 different stereoviews with Philippine subjects were published. William Darrah, a distinguished writer on the subject, placed that number at 2500. Many views were originally published with a photographic negative reference number. This is the case for Keystone, some Underwood, Kilburn, White, Graves and Griffith. In some cases, slightly different shots taken at intervals of a few seconds were published with the same negative number. These are known as variants. Sometimes identical views were also published with different legends by the same publishers or by different publishers. In addition to the negative number, a sequence number in a set in sometimes shown. This number is typically at the top right corner of the view or at the center top (between the two photos), or sometimes prefixes the negative number.

STEREOVIEWS DURING SPANISH TIMES

The earliest known photographs of the Philippines are stereoscopic views of the Tingian 
tribes people of Northern Luzon. Taken in 1860 by an unidentified Frenchman, they are 
part of a larger set featuring the peoples of Polynesia and were sold a commercial views in Europe. They were taken in hyperstereo: the two lenses were too far apart when the photo was taken, or the two photos were taken with the same camera, which was moved between the two shots. The result is that the stereoscopic effect is exaggerated making the view 
look somewhat grotesque.

An anonymous publisher printed a set of stereoviews of the 1863 earthquake in Manila. Interestingly, it seems that the photos were not taken with a stereoscopic camera, but 
that the stereoscopic effect was added when the photos were processed and printed. 
The effect consists of just two planes, with a foreground and a background following 
roughly the subject of the photo. The views are not captioned. The event was identified 
by comparing the views with known illustrations of the 1863 earthquake.

An interesting stereoview from Spanish times is a photograph taken in 1881 by the French ethnologist Alfred Marche of a group of Negritos in Iriga, Bicol. A woodcut engraving was made after the photograph and published by Marche in the 1886 issue of the magazine 
Tour du Monde.