The doubled image suggests that it was intended for a primitive 3-D viewer.

First thing I thought too was it is a stereoscope card.

we have one of the old stereopticon card holders of viewers or what ever its called. Her grandmother was born 1889 and passed away in 1991 at 102. We took care of her the last 4 years of her life. up to the last 5 or 6 months she was still sharp as a tack. When she started going down hill she went down fast. Anyways we have the viewer that you would use for that type picture I'll have to drag it out and check it out viewing this picture.

I remember that there were a lot of black & white battlefront pictures from WW I with it.

but all we have left is the viewer. Her mother has been dead for 30 years now and my wife has no idea where all the photos went. The viewer was being thrown away when I seen it and said I think I'll keep this if you all don't mind and they (wifes family) all said go for it we don't have any use for it. My wife and I have it stashed back, not really knowing what its was for until now.

A nice box of them. He's collected a few more since he inherited her old collection, but most are ones she collected.

Someday I will get around to scanning and cataloging them. It's been a long time since I looked at them so I don't remember which ones she had.

from a slightly different angle or spot.

perspective.

my eyes are too imbalanced but yeah - that is exactly what it is.

I'm surprised at how good the photo is actually. Many of the photos from that era are compromised by poor photography. Guess the technology had already started to mature by the time this one was taken and/or the photographer was good at his craft.

Wow!

this is very hard to do if the distance between corresponding points on the two photos is larger than the distance between your eyes, so you may have to shrink the photo to a size appropriate for your interpupillary distance. I have eyes which diverge very easily (needed therapy for that several years ago) so I have lots of practice with this. Try relaxing the focus of your eyes to infinity while holding the photos directly in front of you, about 15" away; your eyes will diverge to parallel lines of sight, which should put one image in front of each eye, in about the same position. If you see two copies of the same feature, restrict your attention to that feature until your eyes spontaneously combine the images and refocus to the appropriate distance. Perhaps the most important thing to do is to get the two images on the same level -- tilt your head from side to side if one image appears higher than the other. Once they are on the same level your brain can combine the two images much more easily.

Some stereoscopic photos really are cross-eyed, but these are rare.

Placing a sheet of paper (card, manilla folder) perpendicular to the photos so that each eye can see only one image also helps sometimes.

Stereoscopes contain positive lenses which change the focus of your eyes to a short distance even when they are fully relaxed; thus you feel like you are looking at a distant object, and your eyes naturally diverge for distance vision. A pair of cheap glasses for farsightedness could do the same thing -- a +2.5 diopter lens, for example, should give you a viewing distance of about 40 cm (16&quot , IIRC. If you are naturally nearsighted, you might have better luck viewing stereoviews with no glasses. (In my case, my eyes are *too* nearsighted, but I can easily see the stereo effect from the pic in the OP with my glasses on)

Eerie to see though.

most were taken at a popular local Hudson River site. People would pose for the photgrapher. Whats interesting when I put them together you can see different prospectives on the same location. They run from the late 1850-1860-s

is there any website which shows more of them ?

to make a panorama, or object ?

put a sheet of letter-sized paper between your eyes so each eye can see only one image. The paper should extend from your nose all the way to the screen, lengthwise. Look at one face but let your eyes see into infinity, behind the screen. After a while, a 3D picture will pop into your brain. After I removed the paper, I could not sustain the view, but it's there, in stereo.