Fields of vision explored in John H Jones's stereographs

JOHN H. Jones's pictures of colonial Victoria feel a little like time travel.

Sandridge Pier

JOHN H. Jones's pictures of colonial Victoria feel a little like time travel, especially as he photographed many of the places that one sees 1 1/2 centuries later on the train from Melbourne to Bendigo, where this recently acquired series is displayed, much of it for the first time.

Indeed, this track - originally known as the Main Line - was built during the years Jones was taking his photographs, reaching Sunbury by 1859 and Bendigo by 1862.

Settlements that were then little more than villages are now substantial towns, while suburban encroachment continues to eat away at rural land: at one point on the journey we pass another bleak development of project homes with their brick veneers growing around timber frames, while just over the adjacent hill are pastures with cows and sheep, and then an olive grove and a vineyard. Presumably these lands too will soon fall prey to the creeping blight of suburbanisation.

When Jones visited this country, it was being opened up by a combination of pastoral activity and, above all, in the 1850s, by the immense energy of the gold rush, which populated Victoria, enriched Melbourne - which rapidly outstripped Sydney in grandeur and in the sheer solidity of its architectural fabric - and built the cities of Bendigo and Ballarat, among others.

Yet although the gold rush was collectively such a dynamic historical force and brought such prosperity, individually it must have been a cruel will o' the wisp for so many who exhausted themselves for little reward.

Jones does show us a couple of these miners, two standing by a tub and cradle and another with a hand-puddling machine - which served to break up the mud and wash it away, revealing the precious flecks of gold - but they are the exception, for people are generally either absent from his pictures or present to give a sense of scale.

We also know very little about Jones, as Alva Maguire explains in her introduction to the Bendigo Art Gallery exhibition catalogue. A name such as John Jones, she points out, is a nightmare for anyone looking through old records and early published sources. Research has brought to light a number of individuals of that name who may or may not be the same person; is our John H. Jones identical with the one who wrote eloquently about taking pictures of a valley in Wales, evoking the delight of seeing the image appear in the darkroom? At any rate, our Jones had an eye for the picturesque and the sublime as well as the practical and the progressive. There are photographs of rocks, mountains and waterfalls to be found within the vicinity of the new settlements, so that he is simultaneously showing us the infrastructure that makes the land habitable and accessible - he has a special fondness for railway bridges - and the beauty spots that would be the reason for a daytripper to venture out here from the city, where he could commune with the sublime spectacles that reveal the soul of the land; these pictures are, after all, contemporary with the paintings of Eugene von Guerard and other high colonial artists.

But the most distinctive thing about Jones's images is that they are not conventional photographs: they are stereographs, pairs of pictures taken a few centimetres apart - roughly the equivalent of the distance between our eyes - and which must then be seen through a special viewer that allows each eye to see only the image on its side. As in the natural experience of binocular vision that this process simulates, the two slightly different images are combined in the brain to produce a three-dimensional view of the world.

We are accustomed to 3-D cinema now as a populist form of entertainment, but it is at first sight extraordinary to realise that the idea of stereography emerged within years of the earliest photographs, and in the same period that Daguerre took his first pictures. On reflection, however, it is not quite so surprising if we recall the 16th-century debate between painting and sculpture known as the paragone, partly inspired by the artistic rivalry of Leonardo and Michelangelo, and its durable resonance in later art theory.

The partisans of sculpture claimed they could represent the solidity and volume of living bodies; the supporters of painting replied that they could represent the whole of the visible world as well as the colours of life. The early stereograph, though it could not reproduce colour, could claim to unite the detailed representation of the spatial world with the apparent solidity of three-dimensional bodies. Hence the name, derived from Greek roots that together mean something like "solid drawing", perhaps on the analogy of Aristotle's use of the term stereos arithmos to mean a cubic number.

Jones published this set of pictures, under the title Jones' Photographs of Australian Sceneries, in 1862 as a set of 120 cards with a pair of photographs mounted on each. Some of these are displayed in the exhibition, and enlarged versions of the twin pictures are hung around the walls of the gallery and allow the viewer to explore details of the topography and built environment more easily than in the originals. This hanging - as one could also see from the reactions of fellow visitors - is particularly useful for those interested in the photographs as historical documents. A map on one wall helps one to follow Jones's route through the new colony of Victoria.

Around the corner is a screen on which the images are shown in the red and green separation used in more recent 3-D photography, and with the corresponding red-green glasses for visitors to put on.

But more effective, and also more engaging in its re-creation of the original experience of stereographic images, is the set of reproductions of Jones's cards that one can look at through a hand-held stereographic viewer that works by simply restricting each eye to its respective view.

Here the images leap into vivid life, and despite all the visual hammering to which we are subjected in contemporary media, we rediscover something of the naive delight of a viewer of the middle of the 19th century. We also realise that Jones has not been solely concerned to document the progress of the colony and the sublime spectacles that await the curious tourist; he has consciously designed each shot, or pair of shots, to emphasise the aesthetic effects peculiar to his medium.

This may not be immediately apparent from looking at the pictures on the wall. A few - such as View of Sandhurst - can in fact seem relatively nondescript until you look at it in the viewer and realise that the odd rocky clump in the foreground is a repoussoir for the depth behind it. Similarly in View at Sandridge - Hobson's Bay, a ragged dark bush has been carefully situated in the front of the composition to dramatise the vast empty space of beach leading to the pier in the distance.

In other cases the intended effect is more obvious, as with the dinghy and chains in the foreground of Sandridge Pier. Diagonal compositions naturally abound, from Bridge over the Yarra Falls to View of Taradale Viaduct. There are also pictures that look almost straight into depth, as in Princes Bridge, Melbourne, where we follow a timber-reinforced embankment with a dirt path, today occupied by the restaurants and cafes of Southbank, to the single span of the original Princes Bridge, or View of Taradale, in which we can make out the shadow of the photographer and his apparatus in the foreground, and a young woman in the distance, standing by a tree, who may be a wife or daughter.

More subtly, there are many compositions in which a distant motif - as in View of Kilmore or View of Maldon - is seen from and includes the top of a hill, so that there is a discontinuity between the foreground and the background, a spatial hiatus that makes the foreground float against the background and produces the intended surprising effect of depth. The more carefully you look at these pictures, especially in the hand-held viewer, the more you become aware of the devices Jones is employing to achieve an impression of delight and novelty.

But how can tiny black-and-white photographs evoke such feelings in people who may have beheld the very same views without even noticing the spatial effects? The answer takes us much further than the novelty aspect of the stereograph and to some of the secrets of the power of artistic representation in general. And it is fundamentally that all art teaches us to see things in a way that is different from our normal, utilitarian vision of the world.

If we are standing on the hill above a town, we may be impressed by the view, but we don't actually see what the View of Kilmore shows us, because we look first at the hilltop around us and then we look at the town. We don't spontaneously see both at the same time and thus appreciate the space between them. It is really perspectival vision, the invention of the Renaissance that was the conceptual precursor of the camera, that makes us conceive of everything within our field of vision as projected on to a single plane.

And so it is really only because Jones's pictures are photographs, that is images mechanically compressed by an essentially monocular process on to a single plane, that the stereographic illusion of depth is so effective. The viewers of these stereographic pictures were simultaneously seeing something astonishingly lifelike and yet something they could not see in nature itself.

At a more serious level - and in a medium with greater scope for imaginative transformation - the same principle applies to landscape painting. It is not natural to see our environment as a landscape. A Stone Age hunter has sharper eyes than we do for the signs of his prey and many other details of his surroundings, but he will never notice the way a tree is profiled against a distant mountain range, the relation between vertical rocks and horizontal water, or the proportions between elements at different distances from his own position.

His eye moves in and out of space, but does not see all planes projected on to a single, imaginary one. That is the work of the painter, who must then transform it all into a pattern that is aesthetically satisfying in purely abstract, a priori, two-dimensional terms.

This is what is called composition; it is the translation of visual experience into an artificial language that, like those of words or music, has its own coherence and, in its very difference from the boundlessness of nature, allows the mind to reflect on and give shape to its experience of the world.

Her Majesty's Territories: Stereographic Views of Australian Sceneries, Bendigo Art Gallery, until April 1