Stereoview Spotlight: 1931 Travels
In this edition of Stereoview Spotlight, we present an intriguing set of 45mm x 107mm stereoviews depicting the 1931 fun and travels of a group of people. At first glance, they appear to be amateur photos. However, not only have all these stereoviews been carefully mounted and neatly captioned on the back, but the choice of subjects and the photo compositions speak to above-amateur quality.
Could these be personal stereoviews of photographer & camera maker Carl Neithold?
Box of 145 stereoviews
The box of 145 stereoviews came with a stereo viewer that seems to be a prototype: two metal Cenei mono viewers assembled to make a rudimentary stereo viewer. Cenei (also spelled Ce-Nei and CeNei over the years) was a company formed by well-known German photographer, Carl Neithold (alternative spelling of Karl Neithold). In the 1930s, Cenei catalogs show the company’s wide variety of box cameras and accessories, including a nicely manufactured Cenei stereo viewer. The Cenei viewers weren’t Carl’s first foray into making cameras and viewers. Earlier, in the 1920s, Carl founded Stereo-Indupor Gesellschaft with another famous photographer, Alfred Krauth. That collaboration produced the Indupor line of stereo cameras and 9cm x 12cm viewers. In fact, a 1937-38 Cenei catalog shows both a 9x12 Indupor and a 6x13 Cenei side-by-side on the same page.
It’s not just the crude Cenei stereo viewer that makes us hopeful that we’ve stumbled upon Carl’s personal stereoviews, along with his prototype of a small-format stereo viewer. Almost none of the stereoviews in the set have people’s names. But here’s one that does. It’s dated August 1931 and carries the caption: “Karl is also photographed.” The phrasing makes it seem as though Karl is typically the photographer, not the subject.
“Karl is also photographed”
But maybe that’s not him. Could be any Karl, right?
What gives us pause is that the guy in the picture above looks 40-ish or younger. If the references we’ve seen are correct, Carl (Karl) Neithold was born in May 1878 and died in January 1939. He would have been 53 when the above photo was taken, passing away almost 8 years later at age 60.
So, for now: still a mystery who took the photos.
Onto a sampling of the stereoviews that were in the set!
Undated Views
Only 4 of the 145 stereoviews are undated and have cursive captions instead of printed captions. The first one shown below is our favorite of the entire 145-view set. We love the composition and the poses.
March 1931
These are a couple of the icier views in the set.
Captions are translations of what’s printed on the back of the stereoview.
May 1931
Clearly, the weather has gotten warmer!
June 1931
Beachball, check. Sailboat, check. It’s summer!
August 1931
Lots of hiking in hills and mountains. But the guy in the “Wayfarer” stereoview seems quite done!
October 1931
Something about this one feels very freeing.
The crude prototype that came with the stereoviews.
We haven’t been collecting for decades like some of our collector friends and we haven’t seen everything. But we’ve seen a LOT of stereo viewers. We haven’t seen this one before. The CeNei Scopers you see here were sold individually as mono viewers. Here, someone has used two pieces of metal to connect the two Scopers and then added a cardholder in the middle. It seems to have been made for the stereoviews in the box.
A later-model Cenei stereo viewer.
We don’t have the 1930s 6x13 Cenei viewer in our collection but we do have the later Realist-format Cenei. Maybe it all started with the two coupled CeNei Scopers!
