P
PANORAMIC PHOTOGRAPHY
The panoramic image can trace its origins to Irish-
born artist Robert Barker (1739–1806) who not only
coined the term panorama but also patented his
method of ‘‘circular’’ painting. Barker’s unique 360
degree view of Scotland’s capital city Edinburgh and
a precursor of today’s IMAX theatres, proved to be a
popular format with many of the early pioneers of
photography, not least a young Frenchman by the
name of Louis-Jacques Mande Daguerre. Daguerre,
originally a landscape painter, invented a form of
panorama in 1822 using paintings of Napoleonic
battles. The Diorama, as Daguerre named his inven-
tion, was a hugely popular audio-visual show that
made Daguerre a wealthy man and thus enabled
him to devote all his time to the emerging science of
photography. Taking up where his fellow French-
man, Joseph Nice ́phore Nie ́pce, had left off, Da-
guerre spent the next 15 years experimenting and in
1839 he unveiled the Daguerreotype to the public; in
essence, the first commercially available photograph-
ic process, which was to revolutionise the way we
viewed the world.
The earliest panoramas were simply two or more
Daguerreotypes placed or hung side by side, but as
the science of photography quickly developed, so did
the technical process of producing panoramas. The
original photographic definition of the termpanor-
amawasdeemedasbeinganimagewhosewidth
exceeded 100—the first cameras designed specifi-
cally to capture a panoramic image emerged in- One of the defining early images was a view
of San Francisco shot in 1851 that used five separate
daguerreotypes to create a panorama of the city and
harbour, though it was believed that up to 11 panels
were originally taken, producing a much wider vista.
Panoramic images were produced throughout the
last half of the nineteenth century, including George
Barnard’s Civil War scenes.
Even up to the age of digital photography, the
cameras used to produce panoramas were generally
of two types—the swing lens; where the lens rotated
while the film remained static, and the 360-degree
rotation version where both film and camera rotated
in unison. Though a somewhat specialist field due to
the nature of equipment involved, early protagonists
of the art were generally the domain of the profes-
sional and included Girault de Prangey (1804–1892),
George Barnard (1819–1902), George R. Lawrence
(1869–1938), Frederick W. Brehem (1871–1950),
Felice Beato (c. 1830–c.1908), and Miles F. Weaver
(1879–1932) amongst others. Panoramas of this era
were still capable of generating much excitement when