The entire collection ‘Traveling in the Holy Land’ includes nearly 200 stereo photographs and an exhaustive publication (which you can view below) detailing all the photos and the locations at which they were taken. The authors also offered guided tours of Palestine for those who wished to actually experience the ‘Holy Land’.

Stereoscope collections were extremely popular at the turn of the 19th century, in the decades before cinema as entertainment. Thousands of collections from all corners of the globe were readily available. Most were aimed only at giving audiences an intimate experience, through the 3D effect they produced, of far-off countries and cultures. The Palestinian collections – of which there were several – had an important ulterior motive. Their goal was to acquaint viewers with ‘The Holy Land’, and thereby to affirm and ‘prove’ a Christian worldview. This particular collection had this avowed goal, and the printed materials that accompanied it all drove home the point as they guided viewers from one biblical location to the next.