{"id":7997,"date":"2011-07-07T23:37:25","date_gmt":"2011-07-08T03:37:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/?p=7997"},"modified":"2011-07-07T23:37:25","modified_gmt":"2011-07-08T03:37:25","slug":"ive-seen-the-future-and-its-in-3d-c","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/2011\/07\/07\/ive-seen-the-future-and-its-in-3d-c\/","title":{"rendered":"I’ve Seen the Future, and It’s In 3D (c)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\""Haunted,"<\/a>I stand accused, by at least one reader<\/a>, of subscribing to mere faddishness in proposing that a 3D tsunami looms off the coast of visual culture. And of wasting time on such transient ephemera when I could write poems instead.<\/p>\n

Major electronics companies are marketing home 3D systems. Major content distributors (ESPN, IMAX) are embracing 3D by making it available to their userbases.\u00a0Major Hollywood studios are producing 3D movies that the public is turning into blockbusters (Avatar<\/em>, Alice in Wonderland<\/em>). Not to mention Bollywood, which is entering 3D production in a big way (starting with Vikram Bhatt\u2019s horror thriller Haunted<\/em>), as well as servicing the burgeoning demand in the west \u00a0via\u00a0the repurposing of existing movies. According to the Hindustan Times<\/em>, “On December 7, Reliance MediaWorks Ltd announced a strategic alliance with LA-based In-Three to establish the world\u2019s largest facility dedicated to the conversion of 2D films and videos into 3D, based in India.” (See\u00a0Roshmila Bhattacharya’s March 30, 2010\u00a0report, “Bollywood hits button 3D.”<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Strikes me as possible that this may prove itself more than a passing fad. Yet even if it turns out to be just a blip on the screen, I’ll still consider it significant in the history of lens culture and visual culture that the pursuit of technologically viable 3D imaging systems and a supportive market for same has gone through yet another cycle.<\/p>\n

Photography itself was of course a fad \u2014 until it wasn’t. Same goes for stereo sound, blue jeans and T-shirts as casual wear, and rock & roll. One function of cultural journalism (and I have that hat, among others, in my wardrobe) involves looking at fads in order to gauge the likelihood of their turning into trends, and from trends evolving into relatively permanent aspects of the cultural landscape.<\/p>\n

\""Dog<\/a>

"Dog with 3D glasses," photographer unknown, no date. Collection of A. D. Coleman.<\/p><\/div>\n

Photographers used to wonder why, as far back as 1967, I wrote about computer technology and the ways in which it might impinge on lens-based imagery. Photo teachers couldn’t fathom why, in 1978, I cautioned the attendees at the Society for Photographic Education National Conference that digital imaging would shortly transform the medium itself, and the field of photo ed. (I gather they don’t find my attention to all that quite as puzzling anymore.)<\/p>\n

Can’t teach some old dogs new tricks.\u00a0So it doesn’t surprise me that some photographers today \u2014 especially photographers of the senior persuasion \u2014 would wonder why I’m bothering to ponder how a substantial shift to 3D in movies, television, gaming, and other previously 2D forms of kinetic imagery would affect the medium of 2D still photography. The simplest answer: I haven’t seen anyone else asking that question, and it interests me regardless of whether anyone else shares that view. Be that as it may, I’ll continue to weigh that prospect \u2014 while also writing poems, whenever one proposes itself. They’re not mutually exclusive activities.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

My correspondent J. P., in dismissing the possible advent of 3D, proposes that it’s old hat, merely the replay of a demonstrably failed experiment \u2014 been there, done that. I think he’s wrong. First and foremost because, as\u00a0Heraclitus pointed out, “You cannot step into the\u00a0same river twice.” As noted in an earlier post<\/a>, this is the third cycle for 3D lens-based imaging, which is now getting tested on a visual culture\u00a0substantially different from the last time around, with a significantly intensified and personalized relationship to the technologies of visual communication. So the previous trials don’t serve as reliable indicators of results this go-round. (Which is why social inquiry isn’t, and can never be, a science \u2014 no such thing as a repeatable experiment.)<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/a>

Two types of 19th-century stereo viewers.<\/p><\/div>\n

The second reason I disagree is that the two preceding cycles had outcomes that were hardly identical, and certainly not decisively negative. The first \u2014 the introduction of the stereoscope viewer and the stereo photograph, circa 1860 \u2014 was in fact wildly successful. As a source of visual entertainment and a vehicle for event reportage and education that 3D technology wasn’t really displaced until talking pictures and the picture press established themselves with the general public, circa 1930. Indeed, the\u00a0Keystone View Company,\u00a0which from 1892 on produced and distributed both stereoviews and stereoscopes, became the world’s largest stereographic company. Keystone’s production of consumer-end stereo viewers and cards continued until 1963.\u00a0That confirms significant public appetite for the experience of 3D in relation to still imagery.<\/p>\n

The second cycle started in the early 1950s, with 3D movies from Hollywood, the underlying technology (which had been around since the days of silent films) given new life by the necessity of movie houses competing for their audiences with television. Color movie film, the big screen, and the 3D effect all served as ways of providing a viewing experience that TV couldn’t. At one point there were\u00a05,000 American theaters capable of showing 3-D movies; aside from Hollywood, 3-D movies were also produced in Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Mexico, and Hong Kong.<\/p>\n

That surge of interest was driven by the film industry, dominated by kinetic images. Attempts at using 3D for the viewing and production of still images met with some success (the View-Master, the Stereo Realist camera), but nothing remotely comparable to the international market for stereoscopes and stereo views that preceded it. Technical problems with projection, coupled with viewer discomfort resulting from cheap 3D glasses, gave this cycle of 3D movie production a short life. And the photo industry’s first experiment with consumer-end 3D still photography faded with it, due in part to limited viewing\/presentation options \u2014 though, as previously noted, the View-Master is with us today, as a kid’s toy.<\/p>\n

\"Nimslo<\/a>

Nimslo 3D camera, 1980s<\/p><\/div>\n

In the interval we’ve had lenticular 3D; the Nimslo camera; and holography \u2014 none of which really rang the cherries of the culture, so I don’t consider them as constituting a phase or cycle, though they do indicate the persistence of the impulse toward 3D. (See the website of the\u00a0New York Stereoscopic Society<\/a> for some history.)<\/p>\n

So the first cultural cycle of 3D photography had a long and successful run, terminated by the advent of new media: talkies, capable of providing a more engrossing sensory experience for entertainment (motion, sound) and, via the newsreel, more rapid dissemination of news; and the picture press, \u00a0capable of providing reportage in depth more rapidly, and more inexpensively, than stereo views of world events.<\/p>\n

In the second 3D cycle, the several industries involved failed to resolve assorted technical problems relating to the viewing experience and (in the case of 3D still imaging) an extremely narrow set of presentational formats that severely restricted the size of the audience, effectively defining it as a fringe amateur\/hobbyist medium for family-circle enjoyment.<\/p>\n

Digital imaging technologies potentially resolve the problems that lens-based 3D imaging encountered in both prior cycles. Distribution via theaters, television, and the internet can make 3D material no less available than its 2D counterpart. Convergence on the web of entertainment and news provides a vast audience for\u00a0content of all kinds. To be sure, technical issues must get sorted out. At the moment, three formats of kinetic 3D compete: active, passive, and no-glasses. So the industry faces the recurrent struggle for market dominance of one or another technology.<\/p>\n

But that’s no more a mark of faddishness than the contest between 8-track stereo vs. the tape cassette. Consumers committed to one or the other; the manufacturers duked it out. Both formats succumbed to the CD, which in turn may give way to the purely digital audio file downloaded to a media player. What consumers want, it turns out, is the best possible audio experience on the most portable playback device.<\/p>\n

\"A.<\/a>

A. D. Coleman with 3D glasses, J. S. Bach with sunhat, July 6, 2011. Photo by A. D. Coleman.<\/p><\/div>\n

Film and video propel this third phase of lens-based 3D imaging. That’s simply where the big money is. But I have no doubt that 3D still imaging for digital capture and display will ride those coattails. Just as stereophonic recording replaced monaural\/”high fidelity,” 3D kinetic and still imaging may supplant their 2D predecessors. It could happen with surprising rapidity, even though it’s been a long time coming.<\/p>\n

Participating in an American Society of Magazine Photographers panel titled “The Future of Photography: A New World”\u00a0at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City on November 20, 1987 \u2014 a feature of that year’s\u00a0PDN PhotoPlus Expo<\/a>, as it happens \u2014 I made the following comment:<\/p>\n

It seems to me that the direction of photography, the technological development of photography, has always been \u2014 there have always been several specific factors that we’ve always evolved towards. One is an increasing capacity to encode a greater amount of information, and dimensionality is surely information. Another is reproducibility, and [yet] another is accessibility \u2014 both technical accessibility and economic accessibility. Now, it seems to me that if some version of three-dimensional imagery fulfills those \u2014 economic and technological accessibility and reproducibility \u2014 then we will have holography. And once we do, then just as color supplanted black & white, just as the print on paper supplanted the daguerreotype, eventually three-dimensional imaging would supplant two-dimensional imaging. If those other factors are fulfilled. When that’s going to be? I’ve been prophesying the appearance of some version of this for years, and all I’m sure of at this point is that it’ll happen “in the future.”<\/p>\n

That was almost a quarter of a century ago. I’d made that same prediction ten years earlier. Perhaps the conjunction of forces that I saw as necessary has arrived. If so, the future I described may lie just ahead.<\/p>\n

(More to come.<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photography itself was of course a fad, until it wasn’t. Same goes for stereo sound, blue jeans and T-shirts as casual wear, and rock & roll. One function of cultural journalism (and I have that hat, among others, in my wardrobe) involves looking at fads in order to gauge the likelihood of their turning into trends, and from trends evolving into relatively permanent aspects of the cultural landscape. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7,8],"tags":[24,121,229,375,423,492,538],"class_list":["post-7997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digital-technology","category-event-reports","tag-3d","tag-consumer-electronics-association-cea","tag-holography","tag-nimslo","tag-photoplus","tag-stereo-realist","tag-view-master","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7997\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}