This essay explores a series of discourses surrounding the images of the early twentieth-century stereoscope, focusing on Underwood & Underwood of Ottawa, Kansas, and the Keystone View Company, of Meadville, Pennsylvania. By publishing images of particular geographic areas and historical events, as well as compendium volumes that included instruction on the appropriate uses and meanings of stereoscopic photos and technology, these companies reproduced a series of rhetorical screens which sought to frame stereoscopy as a particularly high-tech, middle-class, white way of looking. Hence, this early twentieth-century stereoscopic imagery suggests important concepts for the study of visual rhetoric, illustrating some important ways in which technological and institutional discourses work to delimit the experience of particular photographic images. (Contains 77 notes.)