Photography: The Key Concepts by David Bate

Author:David Bate
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Second Edition
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2016-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

Panoramas

It is curious that one of the early things that automatic digital cameras were designed to do was to stitch together several pictures into a panorama—because this is exactly what early nineteenth-century photographers did too. As early as the mid-1840s, William Henry Fox Talbot worked with the painter Calvert Richard Jones to put together frames to create panoramic “joiners,” or, as they were called, “conjoined prints”—a panoramic view made from paper negatives. A specially designed panoramic camera had already been invented by 1847, and the idea of a spectacular landscape scene, already familiar from the dioramas of Daguerre (first made popular through lithographs), became a commonplace form of photographic landscape, usually showing tourist spots or famous sights. Later developed by cinema into a “Panavision,” and various wide-screen ratios of vision, the panoramic view ideally shows the vast magnitude of “nature” and the minuscule details of that space that photography has the potential to record. These landscape views create a massive spectacle, at once sublime in scale and information, yet diminishing in that spectators can feel minuscule in relation to them. The panoramic—panoptic—view offers a kind of mastery over the scene and, by implication, over “nature” itself. Like a child in front of a cake too big to digest, the panorama is impossible to eat or digest, thus it is satisfying and dissatisfying in terms of the aim of seeing. The panorama is “magnificent,” both picturesque and sublime. The viewer is as much absorbed in the technological feat of the representation as the scenes they have seen. The pleasure that accompanies such images, often a sense of being “disembodied” as in a bird’s-eye view, is precisely that: the enjoyment of a “disembodied” experience, an identification as within the space itself. We might then add this panoramic aspect: the capacity to render precise information of photographic vision into the existing aesthetic categories of picturesque and sublime.

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