The Concentration of Attention: Stereo Photography by Hal Rammel

Photographer: Hal Rammel

Writer: Steve Schlei

Publisher: Penumbra Music and Books (2018)

From the author: My first experiments with 3D photography in the late 1990s exclusively used the 35mm format (35mm cameras with a slidebar attachment or with a David White Stereo Realist camera). I entered the world of pinhole photography almost simultaneous with this interest and built my first stereo pinhole camera in 1999.  In addition, around this time I also devised a means of making stereo photograms that I mounted in the conventional (vintage) stereoview card format of 3 1/2” x 7.” To facilitate viewing these cards, I refashioned vintage stereoscopes to fit the width of modern eyeglasses.  

In 2017 I began working with a larger format for stereo photograms (7 1/2” x 7 1/2” square stereo pairs) and modified Charles Wheatstone’s designs for a reflecting stereoscope (1838) that could be used to view there photos. I’ve designed and built a handheld variation on the reflecting stereoscope for viewing these same photograms as side-by-side mounted stereo pairs.  In 2018/2019, this work, in the realms of both cameraless and pinhole photography, has been included in the 57th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Art Museum (Pittsburg, PA) and in a solo exhibition at the Cedarburg Art Museum (Cedarburg, WI).

A selection of my work with stereo (3D) photograms in the vintage stereoview card format has been published in the collection The Concentration of Attention (2019) with an essay on “Stereo Photography and the Art of Hal Rammel” by Steve Schlei.