Rock star swaps guitar for photographs on visit to Bradford

The Queen guitarist was at the National Media Museum talking about his new book, bringing together a collection of three-dimensional images depicting life in a village in the 1850s.

The images, by photographer Thomas Richard (TR) Williams, include a woman at her spinning wheel, a blacksmith outside his smithy, and villagers gossiping over a bite to eat in harvest fields.

Brian produced the book, A Village Lost and Found, with photographic conservator Elena Vidal, who did some research at the National Media Museum, which has some of Williams’ work in its archive.

“It tells a story that has fascinated me for more than half a lifetime,” said Brian. “The photographs capture a way of life under threat.

“At that time only the wealthy could afford to have photographic portraits taken, but these images show ordinary people going about their daily lives.” Brian’s passion for stereoscopic photography started with a boyhood fascination for 3-D picture cards given away in cereal packets.

Later, scouring antique shops for stereoscopic photographs and viewers, he discovered Williams’s series of 59 stereo cards, Scenes in Our Village.

A Village Lost and Found presents the complete set, viewed in 3-D in a stereoscope which Brian designed.

The identity of the village was lost for 150 years, but in 2003 Brian discovered it in Oxfordshire. He said: “It was largely unchanged, we stood where TR Williams had stood and saw the view he’d seen – thatched cottages, the church, the river.”

Colin Harding, curator of photographic technology at the National Media Museum, said: “TR Williams was a pioneer of Victorian photography about whom comparatively little was known. It’s fantastic to hear Brian and Elena talk about their exhaustive research, resulting in a book which is a significant contribution to photographic history and a fascinating glimpse of Victorian rural life.”

• Read our interview with Brian May in the Telegraph & Argus tomorrow.