Interieur van de Holy Trinity Church te Stratford-upon-Avon c. 1850 - 1880

This is Alexander Wilson's photographic study of the Holy Trinity Church at Stratford-upon-Avon. It’s a stereoscopic image, so it was made with a special twin-lensed camera, intended to give a heightened sense of depth. Photography in the 19th century was a complex alchemy. Glass plates had to be coated with light-sensitive emulsion, exposed, and developed very quickly. This was an era when the skilled labor of production was essential to the aesthetic result. The photographic print we see here – made of humble materials, paper and silver – represents the culmination of that process. Notice how the image is dominated by the great stained-glass window, which of course is itself another kind of crafted image. Both the window and the photograph are technologies of transparency, ways of capturing light. They also share a common purpose: to provide visual evidence of things unseen, whether a spiritual realm or simply a distant place.