Based on 30 years of research, Brian May's painstaking excavation of exquisite stereo photographs from the dawn of photography transports readers to the lost world of an Oxfordshire village of the 1850s. At the book's heart is a reproduction of T. R. Williams' 1856 series of stereo photographs, "Scenes In Our Village." Using the viewer supplied with this book, the reader can become absorbed in a village idyll of the early Victorian era: the subjects seem to be on the point of suddenly bursting back into life and continuing with their daily rounds. The book is also something of a detective story, as the village itself was only identified in 2003 as Hinton Waldrist in Oxfordshire, and the authors' research constantly reveals further clues about the society of those distant times, historic photographic techniques, and the life of the enigmatic Williams himself, who appears, Hitchcock-like, from time to time in his own photographs.
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A Village Preserved, Green and All: Brian May’s Photographic Recovery
By RANDY KENNEDY
The name T. R. Williams does not ring many bells in photohistorical circles today. But in Victorian London he was a kind of rock star, whose instruments were marvels of scientific novelty — the stereoscopic camera and viewer, developed in the 1850s, were the earliest forerunners of the View-Master and the current 3-D movie craze.
His fame as a stereo portraitist reached such heights that the Queen herself requested his services, to photograph her daughter, Princess Victoria, on her 16th birthday and on the occasion of her wedding. But by the early 20th century, after movies brought an end to the form’s wild popularity, the work of stereo photographers like Williams often wound up in the dusty remainder bins of photo shops and auction houses.
Which is where an actual rock star affiliated with a different sort of Queen — Brian May, the woolly-haired lead guitarist for the beloved glam-band — was perpetually on the prowl for them for years, between gigs, in many of the cities where the band was packing stadiums.
“Depending on where we were, I always knew the dealers and collectors to go see,” recalled Mr. May, who has been obsessed with stereo pictures for most of his life. “And it was nice because I was interacting in a world that was completely divorced from the rock world. None of these guys thought of me as anything other than an enthusiast, unless one of their kids would see me and say, ‘Do you know who that is? He’s in Queen!’ ”
Now, after more than four decades of collecting, Mr. May’s passion has resulted in an ambitious door-stopper of a historical study examining Williams’s life and work, “A Village Lost and Found” (Frances Lincoln). To promote the book, which Mr. May wrote with a photography historian and conservator, Elena Vidal, he has embarked on a tour considerably more sedate than the ones he used to know. Last week, one of its stops was Huron, Ohio (pop. 7,348), where he and Ms. Vidal were guest speakers at the 36th annual convention of the National Stereoscopic Association, a group of ardent hobbyists and collectors.
On Thursday the tour came to New York City, where Mr. May spoke before a modest but appreciative crowd at the Barnes & Noble branch in TriBeCa. (Only one Queen T-shirt was in evidence but an exuberant fan did bring his red electric guitar to try to get Mr. May to sign it.) On Friday Mr. May was to play undoubtedly the tour’s most august venue, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, discussing “A Village Lost and Found” with Ms. Vidal as part of the museum’s lecture series.
In an interview at the Waldorf Astoria, where he was staying, Mr. May said that the book had been a dream of his almost since he came across his first Williams stereo-photo card — a pastel-colored rural reverie — as a college student in London and wondered “What in the world can this be?” While Williams had a thriving business producing portraits and views of notable events of the day, he seemed to have spent years working on a project much more personal in nature, a series called “Scenes in Our Village,” that chronicled daily life in a tiny countryside town.
The pictures in that series — with titles like “Old Dancy Enjoying His Pipe,” “Little Polly Gone Fast Asleep” and “Loading the Dung Cart,” and with sentimental poems, probably written by Williams himself, printed on the backs of the cards — were an attempt to capture a vision of English rural life that was already disappearing in the 1850s, as the Industrial Revolution gathered speed. The nostalgia for this kind of an idyllic past runs deep in English culture, and was memorably celebrated (and poked fun at) by another British rock band, the Kinks, in their song “The Village Green Preservation Society.” (“We are the Office Block Persecution Affinity/God save little shops, china cups and virginity.”)
Williams’s photo cards, many of them hand-colored, present such an idealized view of that vanishing world that Mr. May and others familiar with the photographer’s work were never sure whether the village they showed had actually existed, or was perhaps cobbled together from scenes in various places.
But one benefit of being famous is that you can get people’s attention. And so in 2003, when Mr. May posted a picture on brianmay.com of the village church shown in the stereo cards and an appeal for help in tracking down its location, he was inundated with information, and within 36 hours found the village, which was no Brigadoon. Called Hinton Waldrist, it still exists in Oxfordshire, west of London.
Mr. May and Ms. Vidal have since spent a considerable amount of time there — as Williams is now known to have done as a child — and have tracked down many of the old buildings and views captured in his pictures. Asked whether he was drawn to it by countryside childhood memories of his own, Mr. May, who grew up in the London suburb of Feltham — which he called “not a pretty place” — said, smiling: “Not memories from this life, I don’t think. Maybe from a previous one.”
The writing life has been just one element of a highly unusual post-superstar career that Mr. May, 63, has pursued since the death of the band’s lead singer, Freddie Mercury, in 1991, and the band’s semiretirement of the last few years. He went back to school and took up the studies in astrophysics he had left when his music career took off in the 1970s. He earned his doctorate in 2008 and published his thesis, the title of which would not look out of place on a Pink Floyd album cover: “A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud” (Copies of the thesis are available on Amazon.com for $63.96.) He has also been a frequent guest on the popular BBC astronomy program “The Sky at Night,” and serves in a ceremonial capacity as chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University.
His head is still surrounded by the cloud of poodle curls he sported during his Queen years, but they have now gone a little gray, and he carries himself with more of an English gentleman’s gravitas than a rocker’s swagger. Two more vintage photography books are now in the works, he said, a full-length biography of Williams and an examination of wildly inventive French stereoscopic work from around the same period.
While he is still involved in making music and has hinted that he and Queen’s drummer, Roger Taylor, might reunite to play together again, he seems perfectly contented these days taking the stage behind a lectern, with a pair of reading glasses perched on his nose. Surveying the quietly admiring bookstore crowd in TriBeCa on Thursday night, he cleared his throat and deadpanned: “This isn’t exactly Madison Square Garden, but I think it will do.”—New York Times
"The work is the result of over 30 years of research, including the detective story aspect of discovering in 2003 the actual village that Williams photographed. Details about rural Victorian society, photographic equipment of the 1850s and the life of the enigmatic Williams himself promise to make this a major contribution to studies of the early history of stereography." Stereo World
By RANDY KENNEDY
The name T. R. Williams does not ring many bells in photohistorical circles today. But in Victorian London he was a kind of rock star, whose instruments were marvels of scientific novelty — the stereoscopic camera and viewer, developed in the 1850s, were the earliest forerunners of the View-Master and the current 3-D movie craze.
His fame as a stereo portraitist reached such heights that the Queen herself requested his services, to photograph her daughter, Princess Victoria, on her 16th birthday and on the occasion of her wedding. But by the early 20th century, after movies brought an end to the form’s wild popularity, the work of stereo photographers like Williams often wound up in the dusty remainder bins of photo shops and auction houses.
Which is where an actual rock star affiliated with a different sort of Queen — Brian May, the woolly-haired lead guitarist for the beloved glam-band — was perpetually on the prowl for them for years, between gigs, in many of the cities where the band was packing stadiums.
“Depending on where we were, I always knew the dealers and collectors to go see,” recalled Mr. May, who has been obsessed with stereo pictures for most of his life. “And it was nice because I was interacting in a world that was completely divorced from the rock world. None of these guys thought of me as anything other than an enthusiast, unless one of their kids would see me and say, ‘Do you know who that is? He’s in Queen!’ ”
Now, after more than four decades of collecting, Mr. May’s passion has resulted in an ambitious door-stopper of a historical study examining Williams’s life and work, “A Village Lost and Found” (Frances Lincoln). To promote the book, which Mr. May wrote with a photography historian and conservator, Elena Vidal, he has embarked on a tour considerably more sedate than the ones he used to know. Last week, one of its stops was Huron, Ohio (pop. 7,348), where he and Ms. Vidal were guest speakers at the 36th annual convention of the National Stereoscopic Association, a group of ardent hobbyists and collectors.
On Thursday the tour came to New York City, where Mr. May spoke before a modest but appreciative crowd at the Barnes & Noble branch in TriBeCa. (Only one Queen T-shirt was in evidence but an exuberant fan did bring his red electric guitar to try to get Mr. May to sign it.) On Friday Mr. May was to play undoubtedly the tour’s most august venue, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, discussing “A Village Lost and Found” with Ms. Vidal as part of the museum’s lecture series.
In an interview at the Waldorf Astoria, where he was staying, Mr. May said that the book had been a dream of his almost since he came across his first Williams stereo-photo card — a pastel-colored rural reverie — as a college student in London and wondered “What in the world can this be?” While Williams had a thriving business producing portraits and views of notable events of the day, he seemed to have spent years working on a project much more personal in nature, a series called “Scenes in Our Village,” that chronicled daily life in a tiny countryside town.
The pictures in that series — with titles like “Old Dancy Enjoying His Pipe,” “Little Polly Gone Fast Asleep” and “Loading the Dung Cart,” and with sentimental poems, probably written by Williams himself, printed on the backs of the cards — were an attempt to capture a vision of English rural life that was already disappearing in the 1850s, as the Industrial Revolution gathered speed. The nostalgia for this kind of an idyllic past runs deep in English culture, and was memorably celebrated (and poked fun at) by another British rock band, the Kinks, in their song “The Village Green Preservation Society.” (“We are the Office Block Persecution Affinity/God save little shops, china cups and virginity.”)
Williams’s photo cards, many of them hand-colored, present such an idealized view of that vanishing world that Mr. May and others familiar with the photographer’s work were never sure whether the village they showed had actually existed, or was perhaps cobbled together from scenes in various places.
But one benefit of being famous is that you can get people’s attention. And so in 2003, when Mr. May posted a picture on brianmay.com of the village church shown in the stereo cards and an appeal for help in tracking down its location, he was inundated with information, and within 36 hours found the village, which was no Brigadoon. Called Hinton Waldrist, it still exists in Oxfordshire, west of London.
Mr. May and Ms. Vidal have since spent a considerable amount of time there — as Williams is now known to have done as a child — and have tracked down many of the old buildings and views captured in his pictures. Asked whether he was drawn to it by countryside childhood memories of his own, Mr. May, who grew up in the London suburb of Feltham — which he called “not a pretty place” — said, smiling: “Not memories from this life, I don’t think. Maybe from a previous one.”
The writing life has been just one element of a highly unusual post-superstar career that Mr. May, 63, has pursued since the death of the band’s lead singer, Freddie Mercury, in 1991, and the band’s semiretirement of the last few years. He went back to school and took up the studies in astrophysics he had left when his music career took off in the 1970s. He earned his doctorate in 2008 and published his thesis, the title of which would not look out of place on a Pink Floyd album cover: “A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud” (Copies of the thesis are available on Amazon.com for $63.96.) He has also been a frequent guest on the popular BBC astronomy program “The Sky at Night,” and serves in a ceremonial capacity as chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University.
His head is still surrounded by the cloud of poodle curls he sported during his Queen years, but they have now gone a little gray, and he carries himself with more of an English gentleman’s gravitas than a rocker’s swagger. Two more vintage photography books are now in the works, he said, a full-length biography of Williams and an examination of wildly inventive French stereoscopic work from around the same period.
While he is still involved in making music and has hinted that he and Queen’s drummer, Roger Taylor, might reunite to play together again, he seems perfectly contented these days taking the stage behind a lectern, with a pair of reading glasses perched on his nose. Surveying the quietly admiring bookstore crowd in TriBeCa on Thursday night, he cleared his throat and deadpanned: “This isn’t exactly Madison Square Garden, but I think it will do.”—New York Times
"The work is the result of over 30 years of research, including the detective story aspect of discovering in 2003 the actual village that Williams photographed. Details about rural Victorian society, photographic equipment of the 1850s and the life of the enigmatic Williams himself promise to make this a major contribution to studies of the early history of stereography." Stereo World
About the Author
Brian May, CBE, PhD, FRAS is a founding member of Queen, a world-renowned guitarist, songwriter, producer and performer. Brian had to postpone a career in astronomy when Queen's popularity first exploded, but, after an incendiary 30 years as a rock musician, was able to return to astrophysics in 2006, when he completed his PhD, and co-authored his first book, Bang! The Complete History of the Universe, with Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott. Stereography has been a life-long passion for Brian. ELENA VIDAL has worked as a conservator of paintings in Florence, Spain and the UK. She graduated as an MA in Photographic Conservation at the Camberwell School of Arts, and has subsequently specialised in the history of stereoscopic photography. Since meeting Brian May in 1997, Elena has collaborated with him on a long-term study of Thomas Richard Williams, and has published a number of articles.
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111 of 112 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Video Review,
By Christoph64 (Tacoma WA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: A Village Lost and Found (Hardcover)
Enjoy the video. For more information go to [...]
28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must have for 3D enthusiasts & historians,
By
This review is from: A Village Lost and Found (Hardcover)
This book comes in a hard slip cover along with Brian May's self designed OWL viewer which is in a separate, gold embossed folder. Every aspect of this book shows its quality in printing, binding and reproduction of these long forgotten photographs.
The images in this book are a series of hand tinted 3D stereocards from the 1850's of, what was thought to be, a lost village in the UK. They portray a pastoral and still slightly primitive way of life that was on the very cusp of ending with the coming industrial revolution. The photographer, T.R. Williams had to pose every shot and make sure the poses were held while he took one image and then another. Where I see window violations in all sorts of old stereocards, Mr. Williams seemed to have grasped the concept very early and he does an excellent job of maintaining the window. This book is an obvious labor of love with substantive research going into each an every image. No stone is left unturned and one cannot help but appreciate this not only as a beautiful 3D experience but an academic one as well. I'll skip the surface incongruity of a `rock-n-roll god' longing for such a simple and idyllic way of life between these pages. What emerges most is the artistic work of T.R. Williams and his ability to create wonderful 3D images at a time when cameras were unwieldy items and stereo cameras certainly didn't exist. Weather it was remarkable foresight and a need to preserve a way of life in images or just a love of the village life at the time, this photographer has saved a bit of history that we can all admire. Along with this book comes Brian May's OWL viewer which has a slide focusing adjustment feature. Thoughtfully designed and with a sturdy construction, this is a quality viewer. I was also happy to see that the London Stereoscopic Company is offering these viewers for separate sale at [...]. With an introductory price of £15 plus £11.50 shipping (to US non-European customers), and with an apparent planned hike to £20, they end up being a bit steep in price, but worth it in the long run if not just to have one. In the pantheon of 3D viewer inventors, we have names such as Wheatstone, Holmes, Gruber and now, should we be adding May? Face it, he could have just included a longorette or a Loreo lite viewer, but due to Brian's passion for 3D, he decided this tome deserved its own high quality viewer, and when one wasn't available, he designed his own. How cool is that? As a historical record and for the high production value, A Village Lost & Found gets 5 stars from me.
25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An extraordinary work of discovery and scholarship,
By
This review is from: A Village Lost and Found (Hardcover)
"Buddy you're a young man hard man
Shoutin' in the street gonna take on the world some day You got blood on yo' face You big disgrace Wavin' your banner all over the place" Brian May wrote those lyrics for --- but of course you remember....Queen. Thirty years ago, the young guitarist and songwriter dropped out of school to see if his college band, Queen, would go anywhere. Did it ever! The group made 15 CDs, sold 300 million copies. Songs like "We Will Rock You" and "Bohemian Rhapsody" brought Queen to the height of British rock --- you won't be mocked if you argue that this was the best English band of all time. And let's not forget Freddie Mercury, the lead singer, lost to AIDs --- and still mourned by millions. When Queen quieted down, Brian May completed his academic work and earned a PhD. from Imperial College, London. (You can buy his thesis on Interplentary Dust, A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud.) As a mass communicator, he had an interest in a more direct explanation of the way things work, so he co-authored a book, Bang! The Complete History of the Universe. And now the versatile Dr. May has topped himself --- he's taken a lifelong interest in stereoscopic photography and produced a picture-and-text book that is at once a historical chronicle and a work of art. A Village Lost and Found: Scenes in Our Village comes in a slipcase; in a separate folder, you get a 3-D viewer that May, and his collaborator, Elena Vidal, created for this project. Where does a fascination like this come from? You guessed it --- May's childhood. As a boy, he liked to let his eyes relax as he looked at the wallpaper in his room; eventually, it moved, popped, acquired dimensionality. Later, a cereal box contained a prize: a 3-D viewer. He started exploring three-dimensional art, making pairs of sketches with the central object of one frame set just slightly off-center. Voila! 3-D! At college, May was near enough to Christie's to begin to build some expertise. He discovered the work of one "TRW". To his great good fortune, learned that T.W. Williams was perhaps the most poetical photographer if the 1950s. Eventually, he rounded up a vast collection of these nearly forgotten images. What Williams had done, May realized, was to freeze a small village in a magical moment --- instead of reading about it in a novel by Thomas Hardy, you could almost literally visit it. That is, with the help of a viewer, you could feel yourself in the scene. And what a scene: a rural idyll, five minutes before the train come to town, and mass literacy, and industrialization. Where was this town? The images provided no clues. So May published a picture of the village church on his website and offered a prize to anyone who could identify it. Thirty-six hours later, he knew--- it was Hinton Waldist in Oxfordshire, the village where Williams had grown up. From there, he was able to document most of the photographs. The book has about 80 scenes, some in color. Intelligently, the left hand page offers a large single image. On the right, you'll find two panels of that image. Slip the page into the easy-to-assemble stereo viewer, let your eyes relax --- and enter a world that's 150 years old. Text? Oh, yes, and very helpful. Beyond the description of the scene, there's a poem for each image, presumably written by Williams, that sets a tone. For example: One other rick and then the task of summer will be done The farmer then shall count his gains and with the setting sun The husbandmen at harvest home shall crowd the genial board And think complacently upon the wealth their hands have stored. The images are gentle, but compelling. Here is a knife grinder chatting with a woman in the doorway of her cottage. A farmer loads a cart. A potato harvest at Dick Carter's place. Martha and Daniel at the churn. Mrs. Giles at the water pump. Gleaners. Anglers. He speaks of a "seminal genius" and "fresh launch" for a nearly forgotten artist. Very true. But for the reader/viewer, it's something else, something that a rocker would, however great his erudition, understand --- it's a trip.
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