The Asia-Pacific Tour currently being undertaken by Pope Francis is attracting a great deal of media attention.

Over the course of 12 days (2nd-13th September 2024), the 87 year-old pontiff is visiting Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste and Singapore.

This news photo (below) from the start of the tour attracted my attention as it well illustrates the continuing influence of stereoscopic 3D photography on today’s visual media.

Shot between two lines of soldiers with the Pope in the distance, its use of different planes along the length of the red carpet and then up the aircraft steps would work perfectly if taken in three dimensions.

The fact that it was published in 2D without any comment underlines a factor in press and website illustration dating back to the turn of the 20th century.

At that point, newspapers and magazines first adopted half-tone printing.

This enabled a variety of publications to re-produce real photographs rather than using line drawings or engravings.

One of the leading players in servicing this demand was Underwood & Underwood of New York & London whose role was the subject of my 2021 doctoral thesis (see ‘Writings.’)

As 3D photographers, Underwood stereographed news events, which they then sold to customers in box sets.

In addition, the company offered prints taken from one-half of a stereo pair for publication by newspapers and magazines.

In time, Underwood’s press photos agency became the biggest in the world.

One of the company’s best-selling sets of 3D photos, published in 1904, was titled A Pilgrimage to see the Holy Father through the Stereoscope.

It featured 36 stereos and a guidebook with maps to shepherd the ‘pilgrim’ from location to location.

Within months of Pope Pius X’s election in the summer of 1903, Underwood sent a team from its London office led by the company’s European manager Eldon R. Ross.

As revealed by copyright forms in the National Archives at Kew (COPY 1/467/107-115), Underwood stereographer James Edward Ellam (1857-1920) took a number of the key images.

These included the new Pope in his pontifical robes in the Vatican’s Throne Room.

Within days, the photo credited ‘From stereograph by Underwood & Underwood’ was published in newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic.

As regular readers of this blog will know, James Edward Ellam is the subject of ongoing Pressphotoman research as a pioneering press photographer.

Press photo pioneer

In recent months, two of Ellam’s papal stereos have joined my collection, both of which appeared as press photos in the then popular weekly illustrated paper The Sphere.

In the first, numbered ’24’ in Underwood’s stereo set, ‘the Holy Father’ is pictured ‘blessing humble pilgrims.’

According to the paper’s caption (below left),  accompanying another shot taken from the same sequence, the pilgrims were from Hungary.

As Vatican officials hovered around the Pope, Ellam as a skilled stereographer was  able to shoot a news sequence within seconds.

This offered stereoscopic photography companies like Underwood a variety of images for their different markets.

This is demonstrated by the middle photo (above) which shows Pius X with soft-brimmed hat in hand standing next to a gilded armchair.

In the stereo (below), numbered ’22’ in Underwood’s set, he is seated in 3D at the same location.

Despite previously having used the standing version, The Sphere used a print of the sitting version in the following week’s issue.

As Pope Francis continues his Asia-Pacific Tour, the world’s media will no doubt continue to follow his every move.

This media attention replicates a phenomenon that saw the day-to-day activities of one of his predecessors being viewed for the first time in 3D, generating similar public interest.

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