Stereo translates as “solid” in Greek.  When objects appear before our eyes each is seen from a slightly different angle and are assembled into a solid by the brain.  Each view is then both a whole and a fragment.  The whole scene is observed simultaneously in time, flatly as on a screen. Yet, each eye having its own unique vantage point in space, adds depth perception. Thus, vision also is sculptural.  Finally, as vision is binocular as opposed to monocular, multiple viewpoints suggest a narrative conflict that must be resolved in some way.  

I began thinking about binocular images in 1998, while an artist fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities. The theme that year was Virtual Culture, and I produced a crude cardboard stereoscope, which I called Vocabulario – referring to the building up of language from multiple parts – with dissimilar 4x6 photographs on each side.  One image is of an avocado plant in my home. The other photo is a postcard of a man standing on a beach.  Together, these two images wrestled with each other in a narrative space, rather than merging into an illusionary space depicting an experienced reality as in traditional stereo images.

I made Vocabulario to visualize Walter Benjamin’s concept of dialectical images.  

He was speaking about a single photographic image serving as an archetype rather than depiction of reality, discerning between past and present.  Political montage during World War II, appropriating images from mass media for symbolic value, seems a good example of this.  Vocabulario signifies montage but also foregrounds the places of the mechanical tool in the production and dissemination of imagery, another part of Benjamin’s thought.