History in Focus

n October 28, 1980, saw his first Civil War stereoview, a photograph of Antietam’s Bloody Lane by photographer Alexander Gardner. Since the age of 13, Zeller had been a hobbyist collector of the 19th-century double image photographs meant to be seen in a viewer that blended the two side-by-side images into one so that they popped into 3-D. But this one was different. “It absolutely blew me away,” Zeller says. “I didn’t know that Civil War photographs had also been taken in stereo.” His hobby became a passion, which soon became a career devoted to the study and preservation of documentary Civil War photographs—“windows into history,” he calls them. In 2001, through a collaboration with fellow Civil War photography enthusiasts, Zeller co-founded the Center for Civil War