Keystone Views

[P3D Lawrence Kaufman <kaufman@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dr. George A. Themelis wrote:

>>KEYSTONE VIEW CO
>>Does anyone have any information on this Company?

>You are new to this, aren't you? :-) I have
>thousands of Keystone views at home and a few viewers too.  Perhaps
>someone can post a brief history of the Company?  Are they still around?
 
The UCR/California Museum of Photography has the 
Keystone/Mast collection. They have some anaglyphs up at 
http://www.cmp.ucr.edu/collections/km/stereo
They also have some history/maps/etc. some links are:
http://cmp1.ucr.edu/riverside/riverside-intro.html
http://cmp1ucr.edu/riverside/mi_to_cmp.html

The Keystone-Mast Collection is 
the world's largest collection of stereoscopic prints and original
negatives. It documents world history from the 1870s to 1950, with a
concentration on the period 1898 - 1915. The collection represents the
entire surviving archive of the Keystone View Company of Meadville,
Pennsylvania, publishers of stereographs. It numbers over 350,000 
items. Stereographs were widely marketed by several large American 
publishing companies at the turn of the century. In the early twentieth 
century, motion pictures, newspaper photographs, and picture 
magazines replaced stereographs as dominant popular visual media. 
Images in the Keystone-Mast Collection are used worldwide in 
textbooks, magazines, photographic books, educational television, 
museums, and academic scholarship in the social and natural sciences. 
Examples of subjects which are extensively represented include: 
Queen Victoria's Jubilee; the Boxer Rebellion; the Boer War; 
the Spanish American War, the Philippine Insurrection; 
the Russo-Japanese War; World War I; the administrations
of Presidents McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge;
Worlds Fairs from the Paris Exposition of 1887 to the 1933 Chicago
Century of Progress; Russia in the reign of Czar Nicholas; as well as
Japan, China, and India in transition from agrarian to industrial
societies.

By 1920 the Keystone View Company was the only mass publisher of the
paired images in the United States. The Keystone-Mast Collection, the
company's negative and print achive, contains the images originally 
made and published by companies such as B. W. Kilburn Company, 
Underwood and Underwood, the H. C. White Company, American 
Stereoscopic, Universal Photo Art Company as well as those by 
the Keystone View Company itself. As the Medium's popularity 
had declined, Keystone View Company puchased the negatives 
archives of its former rivals. In addition, the archive contains 
many tens of thousands of unpublished stereoscopic views.

The collection does not contain examples of the published cards 
produced by the companies whose negatives form the core of the 
collection. Since acquiring the collection, the museum has collected
published stereo card views to form an auxiliary subset within the
Keystone-Mast holdings. This collection contains examples of the
products of companies whose negatives are within the Keystone-Mast
collection as well as stereo images from other companies and
photographers.
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Lawrence


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