A Village Lost and Found: An Annotated Tour of the 1850s Series of Stereo Photographs "Scenes in Our Village" by T. R. Williams

by Brian May and Elena Vidal

• ISBN13: 9780711230392
• ISBN10: 0711230390
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2009-12-22
• Publisher: Shelter Harbor Pr

Summary

This book is the perfect antidote to the stress of life in the 21st Century.It portrays the idyll of life in an 1850s village, "far from the sound of the train's whistle".The identity of the village was lost to the world for 150 years, and only by a miracle does this magical set of stereoscopic views survive, brought together for the very first time by Brian May and his co-author, photohistorian Elena Vidal. Their research is amazingly in-depth, but the book is utterly readable, and the pictures leap into glorious 3-D, viewed in the new focussing stereoscope which May has designed and produced, to bring the stereos to life, and then fold neatly into the slip-case of the book.The book gives an extraordinary insight into everyday village life at the time - with a woman at her spinning wheel, the blacksmith outside his smithy, three men at the grind stone sharpening a tool, the villagers in the fields, bringing in the harvest as well as often taking time to enjoy a good gossip. The result is a powerfully atmospheric and touching set of photographs. A Village Lost and Found brings master pioneering stereographer T. R. Williams's passionate life-work Scenes in Our Village to a new audience - in glorious 3-D, as never before.

Excerpts

'Somehow, in the first ten years of stereo photography, a handful of Chemist / Artist / Photographers both technically and artistically did it all'.



'One does wonder if this secrecy [over the location of the village] might have been deliberately engineered ... perhaps he intended a dual purpose for the project: privately a trip back into the idyllic world of his own childhood, and publicly, a symbolic celebration of a universally disappearing way of life.'