Biography, Myth & Time-A Peek at Claudia Kunin
If you attend a Claudia Kunin exhibit, you’ll be given a pair of those funny glasses. Wait a minute, you say, aren’t they for movies? From the 
Biography, Myth & Time-A Peek at Claudia Kunin
If you attend a Claudia Kunin exhibit, you’ll be given a pair of those funny glasses. Wait a minute, you say, aren’t they for movies? From the 50′s? Isn’t that technology… kind of old?
Actually, it’s ancient. The concept of stereoscopy, the presentation of two very similar pictures, side by side, for combination in the mind, was around long before photography was invented. Principles of depth perception were known to Euclid, and surfaced in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Other Renaissance artists produced side by side “stereoscopic” drawings, but it wasn’t until 1838 when British Professor Charles Wheatstone invented the stereoscope that people were able to see the dual images as one, with the illusion of depth.
Eleven years later, David Brewster described a binocular camera, and the first stereoscopic pictures were produced. But when he presented Queen Victoria with a stereoscope at the 1851 World’s Fair, the technology exploded into the popular realm. We may associate 3D with 1950′s movies, but by the 1850′s half a million households had a viewer, and until the 1920′s, stereo picture viewing remained a major source of home entertainment.
Back to those glasses. 3D can also be produced by printing two slightly offset negatives, one with the blue/green color info, the other with the red color info into a single image called an anaglyph. Then the red lens/cyan lens glasses recombine the color information, and the slight discrepancy in the placement of the two negatives provides the illusion of depth, like a peek into another world. Which is one effect Claudia Kunin seeks to achieve. But if the technology is old, so are myths and dream, and that really is what her work is all about.
Kunin graduated from the University of Oregon in 1976 with a B.S. in Psychology, and worked for many years as a commercial photographer. But entering her fifties and faced with a serious illness, she took stock and decided she wanted to succeed as a fine artist.
She has. Her work is in the Getty Museum