DAVID LIVINGSTONE

Portrait of David Livingstone 11x16mm published by the London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company, undated.The back has the following imprint: Sole photographers to the International Exhibition 1862.

London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company: Some time in 1854, at 313 Oxford Street, the “London Stereoscope Company” was born, and under the leadership of Managing Partner George Swan Nottage, by 1856 the company had changed its name, to “The London Stereoscopic Company”, and finally in May 1859 assumed the name it was to retain for years to come: the “London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company”.

Their business was selling stereo views and viewers to the public, and they were leaders in a boom which swept England, Europe, and eventually the United States too, of stereo photographs of every conceivable subject, which, viewed by means of a stereoscope, presented scenes in life-like three dimensions. In February 1856, the London Stereoscopic Company (LSC) advertised, in the Photographic Journal, “The largest collection in Europe, upwards of 10,000” stereo views.

Much of the workings of the LSC in its early years is still shrouded in mystery, and the relationship it had with the pioneering photographers whose work it published remains unclear, but the company was evidently at a peak of production by the end of the 1850s; today’s collections of the finest cards from this period by James Elliott, Alfred Silvester, Mark Anthony, Charles Goodman, and many others always contain large numbers of examples bearing the familiar blindstamps of the LSC. In the 1860s, one of the LSC’s notable publications of stereo cards was a long series depicting the interior of the 1862 International Exhibition, in what is now Exhibition Road, South Kensington.

When the stereo card craze faded during the late 1860s, the company appears to have continued to do a healthy business, catering for the newer fashion for Cartes de Visite, but this too was fading by 1870. The company subsequently diversified into many areas; Getty images, who much later bought much of the surviving archives of the LSC, say, “At its peak, LSC was one of the largest and most diverse businesses, with a global network of offices and staff photographers, selling and licensing images, cameras, equipment, papers and plates.” It seems that at some point in the continued life of the LSC it fell on leaner times, and the company does not appear to have been able to participate in the second great stereoscopic boom at the turn of the century, dominated by Keystone, and Underwood and Underwood. The company was finally dissolved in 1922. http://www.londonstereo.com/introduction.html