View Masters are a copyrighted format of stereoscope, two nearly identical images that are viewed together to present a 3 dimensional image. The images are arranged on "reels", which are thin cardboard disks, about the size of a beer mat, containing seven small transparent colour photographs on film. They are simple and surprisingly effective.

There are over 1,000 of them in my father's collection. When he put a reel into the viewer and held it up to my eyes I was suddenly immersed in his world, able to see the places he had seen as it was at the time.

Every one of those little photographs, perhaps that should be every two of them, told an amazing story about an amazing place, and the even more amazing man that had been there.

The View-Master system was introduced in 1939, although stereoscopes are much older.  View-Masters were a huge hit from the start. It wasn't just that they were 3D images, it wasn't just that the viewer was simple to use and portable, it was the fact that the photographs were all colour, and high quality at that. It was the advent of Kodachrome colour film that made the images practical. Edwin Mayer, a pharmacist working at Sawyers Photo Finishing Service, took two things that already existed, and created a worldwide phenomenon. Soon all the world's famous sites were available on disk.

View Masters, or something very like them, were popular in the Soviet Union too, where colour photography was relatively rare. The OMZ factory, makers of military optics and cameras, began producing the "Leningrad Viewer" in large numbers after a flash of inspiration. The Leningrad Viewer has seven pairs of images arranged on a reel, roughly the size of a beer mat. How curious.....