A strong case can be made that the panoramic photograph in its broadest conceptions has been, since the invention of photography, a key element in ‘modern’ ways of looking, in particular because it has been used to visualize the major issues and concerns of modernity on the grandest scale.
Simple definition of a panoramic photograph is difficult, as so many ways have been used by photographers to achieve an image that goes beyond the conventional formats. Some sources insist on the image being made by a 360-degree rotational camera, but this would exclude many images described as ‘panoramic’ by their makers. Circular, fisheye images are one example; the continuous strip images of the periphery camera another.
Indeed, the meanings given to the term ‘panoramic’ have always fluctuated, as artists, photographers, and scientists have sought a wider perspective on humanity and nature. Invented by the panorama painter George Barker in the 1790s, the term originally meant simply a distant, all-encompassing view from a vantage point. Later, it came to describe a circular painted image taking in all four points of the compass. But whether continuous or assembled, single-image, joiner, or collage, there has been a long fascination by photographers with the genre. The invention of photography itself is closely linked to the panorama, for J.-M. Daguerre himself was a panorama painter, and his diorama has some clear links to the invention of the medium in the 1830s.
Since the beginning of photography, the ‘wider’ view has been embraced by its practitioners to make images that explore the limits of human vision—of what photography can enable us to ‘see’. The richness of this vision is impressive. It runs from early daguerreotype and calotype views in the 1840s, through the golden age of French photography in the 1850s and 1860s (Baldus, Braun, the Bisson brothers); the multiple-image tableaux of Rejlander and Peach Robinson of the same period; the experiments of Muybridge and Marey in the 1870s-1880s; the new vision of pictorialists such as Stieglitz, Steichen, and Puyo at the turn of the 20th century; then on through modernism with Brandt's wide-angle nudes and Avedon's Vietnam-era joiner-style group portraits, and up to contemporary work by artists like Hockney, Wall, Gursky, and Sam Taylor Wood. During each of these moments the panoramic genre has offered art and science new ways of visualizing big themes and big ideas about the natural world, the built environment, and human relationships. A commercial medium par excellence, the panoramic photograph was boosted by photographers who saw it as a means both to increase their profits and to make intriguing images.
Panoramic photography has been widely used since the 19th century to visualize the vast scale of human progress, but also as the best way to attempt to ‘take in’ or represent the devastation and tragedy of natural disaster and armed conflict. Events from the Crimean War to 11 September 2001, from the Rhône floods of 1851 to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and other 20th-century catastrophes, have all been captured by photographers who adopted the panoramic ‘Big Picture’ as the best method for visualizing their scale and impact.
The earliest panoramic photographs were made within two or three years of photography's invention in 1839, and the first known patent for a specialized panoramic camera, by an Austrian, dates from 1843. Many early panoramas were simple assemblages of two or more daguerreotypes placed alongside each other (such as the W. S. Porter (1822-89) and C. Fontayne views of Cincinnati waterfront, 1848), yet the fascination with this type of view ensured that by 1844-5 Friedrich von Martens (1806?-85?) and others in the circle around N. M. P. Lerebours were making wide-view daguerreotype panoramas of the Louvre and Seine on a specially designed swing-lens camera (also marketed by Lerebours) using a curved plate. Henry Talbot and his circle were equally fascinated by the problems of making a wider view by joining a series of paper negatives (Calvert Jones made several impressive images in the mid-1840s by this method), but it was with the widespread adoption of the negative-positive process that the genre really took off.
The panoramic photograph rapidly became a form of imagery symptomatic of modernity itself, being used in various ways from the mid-19th century to record wars, exploration, the creation of new cities and industrial enterprises, scientific and technical advances, and the emergence of new forms of society and social relationships—the last expressed in carefully orchestrated scenes of mass celebration, from the private banquet to the military tournament. Until the 1860s and 1870s, groups of soldiers were mainly depicted by the great photographers of the time (Fenton, Disdéri, Beato) in proto-panoramic views where the subjects are posed informally, but from the 1880s they increasingly appear in uniformly serried ranks, as modern warfare and its demands for discipline and industrial efficiency start to take over. The panoramic camera was seen from the 1850s onwards by many inventors and photographers as having military uses (Camille Silvy invented one for this purpose in the 1860s), and this accelerated development of the rotational camera capable of taking a 360-degree view. The Lumière brothers' drum-shaped Periphote (1901), for example, seems ideal for taking pictures from a trench or fortress. The first widely sold professional variant, the clockwork-rotated, roll-film Cirkut camera patented in 1904 and sold from 1907 by Eastman Kodak, was used for numerous purposes, from military reconnaissance to large-group photography, and was successful because the quality of its results made them easy to sell: to club members, college graduates, industrial and mining companies, and tourists. (The Cirkut No. 10 remained available until 1941.).
By the early 20th century whole armies, fleets, and air forces were being recorded by enormous photographs that offered emblematic evidence of military power. Cirkut photographers such as Eugene Goldbeck and Arthur S. Mole devised techniques for making orderly panoramic views of thousands of soldiers, battle squadrons, and formations of aircraft. Assemblages of the great and good, wedding parties, beauty contests, funerals, and a host of other social events were also favoured by photographers capable of using the technology of swinging lenses and gear-driven cameras to create images that conveyed social cohesion and institutional stability.
But the panoramic image has been used not only to encompass humanity en masse, but to explore individuality. Jacques-Henri Lartigue's extremely personal panoramic images from the 1920s and 1930s of his wife Bibi and their life of leisure on the Côte d'Azur reveal how an artistic temperament can transform an instrument of documentation into an expressive tool. (In Lartigue's hands the format seems perfectly calibrated to take in a yacht's deck or the bonnet of an Hispano Suiza.) So do the aesthetically more modest efforts of Nicholas II of Russia, who had recorded both military reviews and family picnics with his Kodak Panoram in the 1900s.
Many contemporary artists who use the camera have created panoramic images to express current concerns. Photographers such as Josef Koudelka, Mark Klett, Naoya Hatakeyama, and Lois Connor have incorporated aspects of panoramic photography into their work, and it has become much more widely known as a genre. The availability of digital imaging techniques such as Quicktime VR have made the panoramic view readily available via digital cameras and the Internet. However, a wide range of equipment still exists to make silver-based panoramic images, from sophisticated and expensive medium-format cameras to humble APS (Advanced Photographic System) compacts using relatively simple methods of masking and selective enlargement.
— Peter Hamilton
Bibliography
- Coe, B., Cameras: From Daguerreotypes to Instant Pictures (1978).
- Meehan, J., Panoramic Photography (1990).
- Watts, J. A., and Bohn-Spector, C., The Great Wide Open: Panoramic Photographs of the American West (2001).
- Meers, N., Stretch: The World of Panoramic Photography (2003)
