6 August 2021: The first batch of Brentano's scans are live in the Image Library! You can take a look at them here. Please also have a look at our joint press release with The Western Front Association; we're asking all site visitors to have a look and help us identify anything recognizable in these images. We plan on adding at least 300 more by 11/11, so keep your eyes peeled!
14 October 2021: Another batch of Brentano's has been loaded into the relevant folder. While we're still hopeful that we can make it to 500 by Remembrance Day, we might have to shift that goalpost due to an excited an unforseen new project we've embarked on. Stay tuned; some big news is imminent!
15 May 2021: Two important pieces of news today.
Firstly, at the request of founding member Bob Boyd, the Collection will be henceforth known as The Jordan/Ference Collection. This will be the permanent name of the Collection moving forward; no further changes will ever be made to it. If you have linked to our site, please update your pointers in accordance with this.
Secondly, we now have an ongoing and evolving collaboration with The Western Front Association. Currently, over 3,000 digitizations of our physical artifacts - fully one tenth of the physical Collection - are now available in an attractive, keyword-searchable gallery format to members. Membership is available anywhere in the world for a nominal annual fee; the benefits of membership extend far beyond the Stereoscope project. Weekly online talks, frequent podcasts, and a must-read quarterly journal are only a few of the perks of membership. We would heartily encourage anybody visiting this site to join the WFA as well. Even if you are only interested in stereography, most amateur collections accessioned by the Jordan/Ference Collection will appear there first, so please do give it a look and sign up!
29 April 2021: The Collection is currently in between flats in New York; all scanning and other requests dependent on the physical archive will have to be paused until June. The upside of all this is that the Collection will now have its own large climate-controlled archival room for the foreseeable future. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
10 January 2021: Going forward, the Jordan/Ference Collection will be adopting the convention of preferring "Great War" or "First World War" over "WW1" in keeping with general universal standards that will make better sense when the site is translated into other languages. When we have time, we will be updating all extant pages to reflect this convention.
11 November 2020: After seeing They Shall Not Grow Old in theatres last year, Doug suggested that some Jordan/Ference images be colorized. After attempts and samples, no images will be officially colorized, though individuals wishing to do their own colorization may of course use the images or request higher resolution scans.
9 August 2020: 60+ new slides have been added to the LSU 45x107 30XX-31XX series, which chronicles the Battle of the Yser. More information to come after further analysis of the work on these done by Doug and Ian in January, but there is an important discovery soon to be unveiled regarding them. The physical collection and digital archive have been updated with the new images; an update to the spreadsheet is in the works. Slides with a "b" designation are duplicates maintained because comparative analysis reveals some tiny, interesting details of the set on the whole.
8 August 2020: Doug Jordan's part of the Collection has finally made its way to Brooklyn; this means that once again high-res scans can be made of all objects physically in the collection. Just reach out and we'll do what we can. In accordance with Doug Jordan's final wishes, the Collection has been renamed "The Jordan/Ference Collection", as of the new steward's beginning to merge his personal collection with the extant artifacts.
17 May 2020: Added André's "Ypres in Ruins" set to the Amateur Views in the Stereography Library. This set consists of a series of eight 6x13cm glass diapositives of exceptional quality, showing the ruins of Ypres. The series is discussed on André Ruiter's stereoscopy blog.
4 February 2020: Added two more amateur sets to the Stereoview Library.
28 January 2020: Added a folder for Loose Amateur Stereoviews. This folder contains individual private views, as well as tiny (smaller than 4) sets of slides that don't warrant consideration as cohesive collections. In all cases, it is impossible to identify the photographer. In the majority of cases, it is impossible to identify the date, location, theatre of combat, and so on, although in some cases uniforms, artillery, armor, and other contextual clues can help narrow it down. While the lack of information can be frustrating, some of these views are quite remarkable. In the future, a spreadsheet will be added as well as a page examining the slides, in order to track any information that we - or our contributors - can ascertain from the images themselves. Keep checking in with this folder, as numerous images will be added in coming weeks.
21 January 2020: Added Reims in Ruins, 23 March 1919, a set of 12 amateur stereoviews, from an unknown photographer, detailing the ruins of Reims in March 1919. The slides appear to have been hand-printed from stereo pairs, as is made very clear by the reversal on Slide #4. A departure from most Reims sets of the "ruins tourism" era in post-war France, the Cathedral is only the focal point of two of twelve slides. Some significant alteration had to be made to a few damaged slides; this was done with a mind to matching the tonality to the non-damaged slides in the set. While many are barely-stereo, they are significant in the bredth of topics around Reims, as well as the precise date - which can be used to help date other Cathedral and general Reims views.
18 January 2020: Added hotlinks from the front page to all the site pages to accommodate the fact that some mobile devices do not respond well to the site menu in the upper-right hand corner.
15 January 2020: With great sadness, I must relay that Doug Jordan passed away peacefully this morning after a lengthy illness. To the end, he was confounded by H. D. Girdwood's lack of card-number consistency and joking about how if he were a zombie, he'd avoid General Pershing as the meal would be too small. We, as a stereographic community, and the world on the whole have lost a great man, full of wisdom, humor, and insight. Requiescat in pace. --Ian
9 January 2020: Owing to a recent site migration, French and German diacritics are not displaying properly in the file folders. This is a known server-side issue, and we are working with our new hosts to hopefully ameliorate the situation. Meanwhile, we've got people looking into various ways in which the images can be displayed in a gallery format instead, with the captions intact. Please bear with us as we struggle with some growing pains due to the migration. The files, once downloaded, should regain filenames properly on your Mac or PC. Meanwhile, this does not affect your ability to view them.
September 2019 Update: Scanning and organization of the French glass slides manufactured by LSU and sold by both LSU and the SDV is complete. The list and images have been loaded to the site. Thanks to all the collectors who contributed to this effort!