http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/03/09/6231373-color-stereo-photographs-of-san-francisco-after-06-quake-found
the amazing news is that six color stereopticon slides of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake have been found. The blogpost reproduces three of the slides, and I've converted one to an anaglyph, viewable in 3D with a pair of red-and-blue glasses.
Click to enlarge. The anaglyph is color-balanced (not very well) and interpolated, and for me the stereo effect is strongest when I fixate on the utility pole along the image's left margin.
The image itself is blotched and blurry, and it depicts only the ruins of some uninteresting buildings. If it fascinates us nevertheless, that may be because it has brought us a step closer than previous photographs to one of the limits that separate us from the past. Color, a twentieth-century supplement to a nineteenth-century technology, has added one more image to the metaphor of something growing into our transient lives from a larger life that will never change. A tree, say. Maybe a tree like Whitman's live oak, uttering itself to us in green leaves.
We might enjoy believing that we can feel its trunk now, and think that at any moment we'll also be able to see through the dark bark beneath which light pulses upward. But that outer limit will never become transparent. Image's colored core will always remain just behind it, in a dark where it will be 1906 forever. To admit our mortal light to that darkness would bring it to its end.
