Stereographs were a popular form of visual entertainment that remained in fashion from shortly after their conception until about 1930. Despite occasional low-brow subject matter, they managed to gain notable social credit, and were even adopted by schools and universities. Their realism was thought to be extreme – stereographs, it was said, did not just display a picture of a place – they placed you there, as if you were visiting the location in reality.
	Travel imagery was one of the most popular subjects for stereographs. While individual images were interesting enough, sets were in particular demand. One might collect pictures of a recent, but distant, war, for example, while others might reflect the stereographer’s journey through a particular country. Such sets were sometimes accompanied by maps displaying where each picture was taken, in order to further enhance the viewer’s immersion in the spaces presented.
Most stereographs were labelled with up to a paragraph of description. Some sets were even accompanied narrative guidebooks. Interestingly, some of these guidebooks “blatantly acknowledged that many of [the] stereographs were staged”, but still held that these staged stereographs were realistic, truthful depictions of their subjects.
The realism of stereographs was considered to be an ideal fit to the object lessons that were gaining vogue in schools. Here, sets were versatile: an individual picture could be part of many different arrangements. One picture might be given context in a narrative journey one day, and a discussion about a particular tribal people the next. Many lessons were ethnographic, presenting the peoples displayed in the stereographs as primitive, and often promoting social Darwinism. An ethnographic tendency was also seen in some travel sets sold for general use.
	In early film, the travel genre was “one of the most popular and developed”, functioning in much the same way as stereographs. Both had some sort of attractive spectacle – stereography’s was the illusion of depth, whereas film’s was the illusion of the moving image. Like the stereograph’s explanatory captions, travel films could be accompanied by a narrator; additionally, many were incorporated into mixed-media travel lectures that discussed any number of subjects. The filmic travel genre seems to have had a broader focus than stereographs, however. While both displayed exotic locales, travel films would just as commonly display local locations, as seen in films like Skyscrapers of New York City, from the North River.
Like the narrative guidebooks of some stereograph sets, there were also narrative travel films. As in other genres of the time, though, the narrative remained subservient to the spectacle. Some narrative travel films focussed on the journey itself; others concerned themselves with another subject, such as comedic scenes. One of the films that does the latter is European Rest Cure, which is about an American visiting Europe’s tourist attractions for his health. Another is Rube and Mandy at Coney Island, which features a tenuous narrative about two visitors to the famous theme park. Musser notes that the simple narrative of such films usually functioned as an excuse to show off several different locations; of the two mentioned here, this is most prominent in Ruby and Mandy. 
	Travel films were also occasionally staged, with audiences “disinclined to enforce rigid distinctions between reconstructed and authentic [scenes]”. Others, such as European Rest Cure, went even further, and used artificial sets – yet were still considered genuine travel films. Evidently, moving images of places like the Swiss Alps were still attractions, even when the Alps displayed were very obviously made of cardboard.
