Long before Instagram trained the eye to stare fixedly — and longingly — at dazzling sights from around the world, there was the View-Master. Introduced in 1939, this hand-held stereoscopic viewer came with cardboard reels that had seven pairs of tiny Kodachrome colour photographs embedded in them. Each pair had almost identical images taken from slightly different angles, tricking the mind into seeing the photographs in 3D. I was reminded of this marvellous invention when, earlier this week, Mattel announced that it will produce a film inspired by the View-Master and the wanderlust that it ignited.
Indeed, this little plastic device — it looked like the virtual reality headsets of today and evoked a similar sense of wonder — brought the world home at a time when travel was expensive and cumbersome. Through this device, one could behold the crisp blue sky that framed the Eiffel Tower, experience the crush of bodies at Mardi Gras, or be hypnotised by the lights of Times Square. It turned travel into something accessible that one could consume visually, privately and, more importantly, repeatedly. It is no wonder then that given the Bengali origins of the travel bug, reports show that the View-Master was one of the most demanded objects at the Hobby Centre in Park Street for close to a decade in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
One such travel-crazy Bengali was my paternal grandfather — he not only gifted me the View-Master and periodically got me reels from different countries but he also spent Sunday mornings surrounded by heavy albums of travel photographs that smelt strongly of camphor and dust. Inside, stuck onto thick, black cardboard pages were monochrome shots of Rajasthan’s forts in the fierce sun, houseboats moored in Kerala’s backwaters, the sun glinting off the tip of the Kanchenjunga and other such photographic postcards of his travels.
I had never been to any of these places. Yet leafing through the albums and clicking through the View-Master, I found myself longing for them with an ache that felt suspiciously like nostalgia. But can one be nostalgic about something that one actually has no memory of? Unbeknownst to me, I was feeling pangs of what psychologists call anemoia — the bittersweet feeling of nostalgia for a time, place, or experience one has never actually known in reality.
Felipe De Brigard, an associate professor of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University, argues that nostalgia does not need real memories. Photographs of places never visited produce longing strong enough to move people across continents because of the way the mind confuses repetition with experience. When one sees the same image often enough, it becomes encoded not as abstract knowledge but as something closer to memory. This phantom memory creates a peculiar tension that demands resolution. One wants to confirm that the imagined matches the real. So when adulthood allows mobility and money, the first instinct is to visit the places that childhood photographs already imprinted.
In leaving behind photographs of the places he had travelled to and seen, my grandfather passed on to me a map of desire. The View-Master did the same for places he might have wanted to see but were beyond his means. Both these inheritances of longing gave me memories of places I had never been. If, as the itinerant journeyman, Pico Iyer, contends, travel at its most basic is an attempt to reconcile the inner landscape with the outer world, then nostalgia for unseen places is proof of how powerfully images can shape that inner landscape. The View-Master and photo albums might both be relics, but a person scrolling through images of Goa or Georgia on Instagram feels the same tug I felt holding my grandfather’s photographs or peering into the View-Master. The technology has changed but the psychology is the same.
