Brian May

Brian May ©  Getty/WPA Pool

United Kingdom | Born in 1947

Sir Brian May, the legendary Queen guitar hero, is not only an iconic rock musician but also a passionate stereo photo-grapher and the world’s foremost collector of this art form. His engagement with stereophotography reflects a deep curiosity about cultural history. As a teenager, May discovered the fascination of three-dimensional images. At the center of his interest are Victorian stereo photographs of the 19th century. May collects, restores, and publishes these works with great care and scholarly dedication.

Following 2019, when his series The Moon Landing in 3D had its world premiere at the Arnulf Rainer Museum in Baden, the festival is now presenting Diableries: Stereoscopic Adventures In Hell, an absolute rarity from his collection. 

This 3D classic, produced in France, depicts scenes from an imaginary, nightmarish underworld in a grotesquely humorous manner. In it, devils and demons go about their daily activities, celebrating, working or parodying human behaviour, and reflect in an almost naive manner the corruption and excess of Paris during the Second Empire. The authoritarian rule of Napoleon III is just as much the subject of deliberate criticism as the decadent lifestyle of the bourgeoisie. The richly detailed miniature sets and elaborately staged figures, modelled in clay shortly after
the invention of photography by the two leading French sculptors of the time, Pierre Hennetier and Louis Habert, combine theatre, photography and satire into a fascinating Gesamtkunstwerk.

May – together with his curators Paula Fleming and Denis Pellerin – has played a key role in making this long-forgotten work accessible again by re-editing it and placing it within its historical context. His collection is therefore not merely an archive of past imaging techniques, but also a living contribution to the history of visual media. Through his dedication, it becomes clear that innovation and wonder are not inventions of the present, but are deeply rooted in cultural history. Sir Brian May’s Diableries are a truly special visual treat in the context of the 200th anniversary of photography.