An NYC comedian is bringing back the art of stereoscopic slides with a show next month
If you've ever dreamed of time travel, you might enjoy the closest thing to it at an event in Williamsburg next month.
That's when Eric Drysdale, an Emmy award-winning television writer for late-night shows including "The Colbert Report" and "Full Frontal with Samantha Bee," is bringing his " Midcentury Stereopanorama " to the community art space and photography store Brooklyn Film Camera.
In these shows, Drysdale lays out a curated selection of the antique stereoscopic slides he's collected for decades — all taken between the 1940s and 1960s. He also hands every guest a rare handheld stereo viewer to display the slides, and encourages his audience to take a look.
"It feels like magic," said Cassidy Routh, a designer and animator who has been to the show four times.
"It feels like you're walking into the past," she said. "Especially in this society that's obsessed with virtual reality. ... We did it in the '40s perfectly and now we're doing it again."
Talk of slides and handheld viewers often brings to mind the View-Masters that many people recall from childhood, said Avery Trufelman, a superfan of the events and the radio producer behind the hit fashion podcast " Articles of Interest ." She said she has to work hard to convince the people she brings to Drysdale's shows that this is something completely different.
"It's like this little tiny movie theater right in your eyes," Trufelman said. "So you have these luminescent, three-dimensional images. You're so close to the past."
Drysdale said getting people to come to his show for the first time is difficult, but that those who do tend to return throughout the years.
"The majority of people who come don't have any idea what they're in for," Drysdale said. "But they've usually gotten some kind of glowing recommendation that they couldn't ignore."
What happened to stereoscopic 3-D?
In the 1950s, America experienced a short-lived craze for 3-D stereoscopic images, and about a million households had special cameras for it, Drysdale said.
He discovered the medium in the early 1990s, when his then-girlfriend asked him to look at some old camera equipment in her grandmother's house.
"I put one of the slides into the viewer and it was an incredible 3-D photo of my wife's great-great-grandmother, a recent immigrant straight from the shtetl, being dragged along on a trip to Parrot Jungle in Florida, with parrots all over her," Drysdale said.
He found the image bizarre, breathtaking in 3-D, and "crazily, aspirationally American."
The very next day, at a flea market, Drysdale found a few more of the special slides. He's been collecting them ever since and now has more than 30,000, though he brings only a curated selection to his shows — slides taken by regular Americans, often at everyday events, that somehow capture the past in a more than lifelike fashion.
That curation is a big part of the draw. Drysdale organizes boxes of slides according to themes like "Roadtrip USA," "Jewish Celebrations" and "Swimming Pool."
He draws extensively on his collection of New York-themed slides for shows in the city, including midcentury images of Times Square, Coney Island, Washington Square Park, and images of the Thanksgiving Day parade and floats from 1954.
Drysdale's shows are limited to around a dozen guests each, as every guest needs a slide viewer, which he provides. He guesses that he has the world's largest collection of viewers in working condition.
That's one reason Drysdale calls the show an "intimate salon," which he sometimes hosts in lofts, art studios and people's living rooms. People pass around the boxes of curated slides, waiting eagerly to see new ones, or pestering their neighbors to return to favorite images or collections.
At every single show, Drysdale said, first-time guests who are astonished by the vivid quality of the images ask him why the technology isn't still around.
The answer, he said, is the same reason he's gone to such great lengths to put together the show: The images are hard to share.
"Once you had printed color photographs, you could share them very easily," Drysdale said. "This is a single photo that you look at in a single viewer – you can talk about what you're seeing with other people, but nobody's seeing the same thing at the same time."
Trufelman finds that aspect of the show to be a feature, not a bug.
"It eludes description even in the moment, when you're there with all the other people," Trufelman said. "You're enjoying it alone together, on this really singular time travel journey."
"I'm actually a little angry that you're doing this," Trufelman said, referring to this story. "This was my cool secret thing that I took people to, and you're kind of letting the secret out."
" takes place at Brooklyn Film Camera on Dec. 6. Attendance is limited to 12 guests. Tickets are $30 and available
