Stunning “3D” WW1 Photos Found – Discovery of a Rare Richard Verascope Stereo Camera

As a teenager, I had a keen interested in both the Great War, and World War II.

It’s kind of grim, but I had a morbid fascination with those two wars, and bought up every book and video I could find on the subject. In fact, I found them so interesting that I actually worked as an artist on Day of Defeat, a WW2 mod for the original Half-Life.

Yeah… I was hooked, but as the years passed, my interested waned, and though I still find those time periods interesting, it’s rare that something comes up that I hadn’t seen during my years of intensive study. So as I’m sure you can imagine, I was pretty excited to discover that someone had found a rare World War I Richard Verascope stereo camera. If you’ve never heard of them, try and imagine an old school 3D camera. That, or… you know, look at the picture of it above.

3D WW1 Photos… Kind Of.

I’m going to be honest with you here, it’s a bit of a stretch to call these 3D, but the effect is stunning and amazingly eerie just the same. Because the files are animated, you’ll have to click on each one to see the “3D” effect, but I promise you it’s worth it.

Let me repeat that: CLICK THE IMAGES TO SEE THEM IN 3D!

The first one is probably my favorite, but they’re all really impressive to see. It feels like World War I was such a long time ago, and yet even then we had the technology to produces images like these.

This photo of soldiers helping each other is surprisingly clear for something so old. It’s amazing that both the camera and the slides it housed survived all these years. We can thank the French Army and the camera’s subsequent owners for that.

Not the clearest of the bunch, but doesn’t this look amazing? I really, really want a print of this to hang on my wall. I wonder if I can swing that…

The only thing better than these slides would be these slides in color. I’ve seen stunning photographs of WW2 in color, but never of the Great War.

So much mud… it’s no wonder that trench foot was so common during the war. Imagine wading through this crap for weeks or even months on end. I did a muddy adventure race once and that filled my mud quota for the year.

More Verascope Photos

Interested in seeing more Verascope photos? You’re in luck, because A Nerd’s World has tons of them. They’re actually the ones that discovered the camera at an estate sale in Niagara Falls, and worked to restore the photos as best they could. Even more exciting is that you can buy high quality archival prints to hang on your wall. It seems my wish has come true.