In an attempt to start sorting through some of the piles of random amateur glass stereoviews in my collection, I picked one at random. It appears to be a family at wintertime, somewhere in Germany, in the early- or mid-1930s.
Sometimes, whilst one is sorting through a newly acquired collection, a new slide or card proves just captivating – and one winds up just admiring it through their favorite stereoscope for minutes on end. This was one from my latest acquisition which had this effect on me.
“La Délivrance”, the statue that was at the center of the Nantes Memorial to the War Dead, was also at the center of a lot of controversy. Placed in July of 1927, it was torn down by far-right wing vandals – not to be restored for 91 years, on the Armistice Centenary.
The Grotte de la Devèze in Courniou, France, known in English as the The Glass Spinner’s Palace, was photographed and released by Bruguiere in the late 1940s – near the end of the era of glass-plate diapositives. I obtained a near-pristine copy the other day and thought I’d share.
While touring the ruins after the Great War was rather unexceptional, this well-shot amateur set is rather bizarre in that a lone woman is pictured in most of the shots, always with a stolid expression on her face and in a very proper stance. Add in a complete lack of other people, she comes off as rather ghoulish, like a spectre haunting the rubble.
