A quarter-century ago, holography threatened to become the next big thing in image-making: the cutting-edge medium that at last could give us a photographically credible illusion of three-dimensionality. Holograms, made under carefully controlled studio conditions by bouncing laser light off objects and displayed by a reversal of that process, emanated their images in an almost magical way. Things appeared to hover somewhere just out of reach, seemingly so real that you could walk around them.

They weren't exactly like most other kinds of photographs (no lenses involved, for one thing), yet photographs-perhaps especially the one-of-a-kind images on sensitized metal plates named after Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre-were their most obvious analogs and precedents. In any case, they were utterly marvelous. And this medium seemed to be the logical culmination of a powerful impulse to capture the world in all its dimensions.