Culture Days takes place across Canada this last weekend in September.
The Pitt Meadows Museum is participating in city-wide events by turning its Museum Sunday program into “3D Through the Ages.”
Reprising a successful session from this year’s summer Heritage Thursdays, the museum is taking the public through three-dimensional fun from Victorian stereoscopes to present-day virtual viewing.
“Come on out and learn about stereo in our anaglyph mini theatre, colour your own stereoscope card, visit our photo booth and take away a personalized 3D magnet, walk down memory lane with our viewmasters and have a look at what analogue mapping was like.”
This all takes place 1-4 p.m. at the Pitt Meadows Museum, 12294 Harris Road on Sunday, Sept. 30, with admission by donation.
Some interesting trivia about stereo photography and viewing and Pitt Meadows – and it relates to our Hoffmann site.
Ladislaus Hoffmann, the father of Hans, was also a photographer. He immigrated to Canada as a bachelor at the end of the 19th Century and settled on land to farm in Grandview, Man., and he brought along camera equipment, including a stereo camera, as a business venture to tide him over when his farm was less productive.
Laddie, as he was called, went back to Germany a few years later to marry Emilie and then returned to Grandview with her. There they brought two children into the world – Elfriede in 1906 and Hans in 1912 – and he used his cameras to document their young years.
Included among these images are some shot with the stereo camera both in Grandview and then, post First World War, in Aldergrove.
But after the family moved to Pitt Meadows in 1934, the equipment seems to have fallen into disuse in favor of more modern box-style cameras.
After the donation of the Hoffmann site to the museum society, the camera equipment, glass plates, and dark room supplies were found in the attic of the Hoffmann house and were donated to the museum, where they have resided since 1999, with many of the pieces on exhibit in our main gallery.
Some of Laddie’s stereo images are – through the magic of modern scanners – reproduced and will be available to look through in our stereoscopes as part of our “3D Through the Ages” Culture Days Sunday session.
Leslie Norman is curator of the Pitt Meadows Museum.