When I started working at Mampel Asens in 1976 at 221 Consejo de Ciento Street, a historic enclave of photography in Spain, I could not have imagined that in the year 2021 I would be managing a collection of more than 5,000 pieces.
It was not something planned, but as a result of working in areas related to photography (first as a salesman, later as an industrialist), and due to what is surely a paternal inheritance (to collect gadgets as one day they could turn out to be useful for something) there came a time when I found myself with a good amount of these "gadgets".
On the other hand, my wife came from an important photographic heritage. Her grandfather had already taken his first steps in the post-war period with a photographic laboratory and studio in North Africa, a hobby that was inherited by his children as a profession, thus creating a family of professional photographers with wide repercussion in the photographic community.
In the early 1990s, my wife gave me a stereo camera as a holiday present, and I was thrilled, I loved it.
And I started to take photographs, and "play around", to search the internet, to document "my discovery". The truth is that there wasn't much about stereo photography, but I was surprised to see that it was not a modern invention, but a known science already before the middle of the nineteenth century.
I started to acquire some devices that I found curious and interesting, and almost without realising it, we ended up putting together one of the largest collections in Europe, with more than 1300 stereoscopic devices.
And together with the previous collected pieces, the family collection of cameras, contributions, various purchases over the years, makes up the collection that we present, and which will soon be available to be visited and enjoyed by lovers of photography, but also for people interested in the history hidden behind many of these extraordinary pieces.
