UCR/California Museum of Photography: The Keystone-Mast Collection

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This stereoscopic image of Russian peasants in a village in the
late 19th century is from the Keystone-Mast Collection.  When viewed
through a stereoscope, the image appears to be three-dimensional.
Photo courtesy of UCR/California Museum of Photography.

UCR/California Museum of Photography

3824 Main Street

Riverside, CA

Website:  UCR/CMP

The Treasure:  The Keystone-Mast Collection at the UCR/California Museum of Photography is the world’s largest and most significant stereoscopic imagery collection. It consists of 250,000 stereoscopic glass-plate and film negatives and 100,000 vintage prints that depict global culture from 1870 through the mid-1960s.

Accessibility:  The UCR/California Museum of Photography is internationally recognized for its magnificent photography collections. Visit the museum for its great changing exhibits of contemporary and historic photography, and for an introduction to the vast holdings of their permanent collection. The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from noon to 5.

Items in the Keystone-Mast Collection, including the glass negatives, may be viewed on-site by appointment. For the layperson with a more casual interest in the fascinating world of historic stereoscopic photography, the best access to the Keystone-Mast Collection is via the internet. Go to Guide to Keystone-Mast Collection,1870-1963, a part of the Online Archive of California, and click on “Online items available.” At this site, you can browse nearly 40,000 digitized historic images from the Keystone-Mast Collection. Click on the images to appreciate the incredible detail.

New earthquake-safe storage for the
Keystone-Mast Collection.
Photo courtesy of UCR/California Museum
of Photography.

Background:  Celebrity endorsements have always been effective in selling new technology. When the press reported Queen Victoria’s fascination with the stereoscopic images at the Great (Crystal Palace) Exhibition of 1851, demand for stereoscopes and stereoscopic images skyrocketed. For the following seven decades, stereoscopic images maintained a great popularity with the public.

A stereoscopic image places two nearly identical flat photographic images side-by-side. When the double-image is viewed through a stereoscope, the viewer sees a combined picture that has the illusion of three-dimensional depth.

Many photographers and publishers ventured into the stereoscopic photography business. Disasters like earthquakes, train wrecks, and floods proved to be particularly popular subjects. In 1892, B. L. Singley made stereoscopic images of the flooding of French Creek near his hometown of Meadville, Pennsylvania. Singley’s set of thirty stereoscopic views of the flood launched the Keystone View Company which quickly grew to dominate the market. Over the years, Keystone not only published thousands of images, but also bought the collections of some of the stereoscope companies that pre-dated them. The result was the single greatest collection of stereoscopic images in the world.

Interest in stereoscopic images waned in the mid-20th century. The Keystone View Company was purchased by Mast Development Company in 1963, but the change in ownership failed to stem the company’s lengthy period of decline. In 1978, the Keystone-Mast Collection was donated to the UCR/California Museum of Photography.

The Keystone-Mast Collection is global in scope. While the 40,000 images currently accessible on the Online Archive of California cover special topics (presidents, Native Americans, etc.) and scenes from the Americas, the Middle East, and India, the full range of Keystone-Mast’s 100,000 stereoscopic images is even larger, encompassing an encyclopedic wealth of photographs from every continent.

Notes from the Editor:  Here’s one stereoscopic image from the collection:

Stereoscopic image of Theodore Roosevelt's Presidential inauguration.
Photo courtesy of UCR/California Museum of Photography.

Leigh Gleason, Curator of Collections at UCR/California Museum of Photography, relates the following story about this picture: “This particular image shows Teddy Roosevelt’s presidential inauguration in 1905. The negative’s scan was requested in very high-res from Ken Burns’ production company. At the time, they told me rather vaguely that they were looking for someone in the crowd. A while after I sent it to them, I received a phone call from one of his staff informing me that from our scan they were able to identify a very young Franklin D. Roosevelt in the audience! They told me they had been unable to identify him in images before, even though they knew he had been in attendance. This shows how much detail our negatives have—and if future presidents can be recognized when they’re no bigger than the head of a pin, who knows what untold treasures might be discovered in the other 250,000 glass negatives!”

Other Recommended Sites:  In Southern California, the San Diego History Center has an archive containing approximately two million photographs, including many stereographic images. UCR/California Museum of Photography Curator of Collections Leigh Gleason says she was very impressed when she took her interns on a field trip to the museum. “We all thought that the program they run there is incredible—not only do they make great viewbooks to enable more access to items in their collection but they also do a lot of great oral history-based research work in the community to both find out more about their items, and also enliven community interest in their holdings. It’s brilliant!”

On the other side of the continent, the New York Public Library has an impressive collection of stereoscopic images, and they recently developed a new twist to increase their accessibility. Their Stereogranimator transforms images from their collection into sharable 3D web formats. It’s a lot of fun creating 3D images from the 40,000 stereographic images in their collection.  Go ahead and give it a try!

Stereoscopic glass plates, film negatives, and vintage
prints in state-of-the-art storage at UCR/California
Museum of Photography.  Photo courtesy of
UCR/California Museum of Photography.

Tour America's History Itinerary

Monday’s destination:  Next stop: Arkansas!

© 2012 Lee Price