The Art of Seeing part II-In the twilight zone between film and stills

Warning: heavy-duty Post!!
Kia ora tatou:

It is time to revisit the question of how we see. This time I would like to talk about format, in particular the panorama. It is immensely popular today. Filmies can chose between the Hasselblad X-Pan, the Noblex, or the Fuji 617, to name a few. Digies can use stitching software to get a result. The options are all there.

You may be interested to know that the panorama is one of the oldest formats in photography. It has been popular since photography’s earliest days-since 1843 in fact, when Joseph Puchberger of Retz, Austria, patented a hand crank driven swing lens Panoramic camera that used Daguerreotype plates 19 to 24 inches long. Josef Sudek used it extensively in a series he did in Prague. Josef Koudelka worked with it some years ago. The list goes on. So why is it still popular? Here is my theory.

Think about the way we look the world around us. Assuming we are standing upright, it is easier to look from side to side. Our spine is designed to facilitate horizontal articulation. Looking up and down requires greater effort. Maybe our forbears were more worried about the sabre-tooth tiger lurking in the grass than the one about to drop out of a tree…

Looking laterally involves no change in perception of scale. Everything maintains its proportions. The only scale change involves near and far, and these are a function of distance. Perspective, a Renaissance invention in Western Art, seems quite natural. Compare this with the act of looking up and down. If we stand in one of those concrete canyons in a city and look up at the skyscrapers, we can get quite dizzy. We lose contact with the ground and the horizon, a vital point of visual self-reference. The buildings stretch up and seem to get thinner at the top. This is called keystoning. The ancient Greeks were well aware of this and made the columns on their temples a little wider at the top to compensate for this visual effect. While the perspective that occurs is the vertical equivalent of what happens with near/far, somehow it seems less…ordinary.
Again if we look down at our bodies, a real foreshortening effect occurs. Observation of our feet (assuming we can see them) occurs on the periphery of our vision. Looking down means looking around/past our nose. Looking up brings our eyebrows into the periphery. Note that our eyebrows project more into our vision than our cheeks. This might suggest that we are more naturally-evolved to perceive in horizontal rather than vertical planes. Lateral observation on the other hand means much less clutter on the edge of our vision.

And there is other historical evidence to support the durability of this way of seeing. The ancient Romans and Greeks made friezes, horizontal images that stretched for meters. Curiously enough, these involved extended stories that unravelled as a viewer moved along them. In a way these were the original forbears of the movie. The viewer moved with the story. In fact one of the very first westerns shot was made by putting the horse on a carousel, so that the background moved behind the rider. Thus the story unfolded, a bit like a (then) hi-tech frieze. However, unlike the frieze, the viewer remains static. Likewise with the panorama.
Note that friezes tend to unfold laterally, as does text. In the East there seem to be a large number of 2D artworks that unfold vertically. Curious then that eastern calligraphy moves vertically. Which raises the question of why Chinese writing is all about up and down.
Film on the other hand is like a kind of moving frieze over a kilometer long. What has film got to do with the panorama, you ask? Bear with me.
Because we only see one frame at a time, because it passes through the projector gate one frame at a time, we get the illusion of a single image. We all know that in reality film is a series of still images, each one different from the one before. As it moves past the gate, things appear to change, and thus a story unfolds. We are happy to go along with the illusion. The key element here is time.
The still photographer deals with fractions of a second. The filmmaker deals with multiples of this. A frieze (sic: panorama) sits somewhere in the middle of this, reflecting the passage of time.

I would suggest that the panorama is the closest a still photographer can get to the philosophy behind the moving image without reaching for a camcorder.
Here is why.
All photography is about storytelling. Whatever and whenever we photograph, we are telling stories. It is all about narrative. It may be as simple as a record of a time or place or person. It can be as complicated as telling a story about human life and expectations. We attempt to condense our story into a single moment in time, to abstract reality using an agreed codification. The still image uses a given format (6x6, 35mm, 8X10) and thus defines the nature of that codification. As an example, 8x10 encourages a considerable degree of formalism. You just can’t work spontaneously with one. 35mm, on the other hand, is a format that begs to be used in a spontaneous way. Look at Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work and you will see what I mean.
The panorama, with its enlarged picture space, encourages the exploration of time and telling a story with a longer timeline. The picture space is so expansive that you need to inject a narrative into it to make full use of its potential.
What got me travelling down this line of thinking? Looking at the image at the top of this post. I was experimenting with the cropping and found I liked a panorama format. But cropping off the top and bottom changed the nature of the narrative. The surfer walking past both added to and created a new narrative. Time elongated. A new line of enquiry?
Perhaps.

For the last couple of years I have given my students an assignment using the panorama as their format. They have to create a narrative about their life and self-perception. What makes it a little trickier is that they have to appear in it at least 3 times, each time doing something different. They can make it as long as they like, that is, choose the amount of time they will incorporate. Thus they become the actors in their own story. Unlike the conventional panorama, in which the camera is at the focal point of the image, it possible to use multiple viewpoints and still create a panorama.
They shoot it with their digicams, stitch it in Canon Photostitch, and print it across multiple pages. They then join and mount the images. The results can be amazing. They are part movie, part still. They break the boundaries of what constitutes a still image. Some, of course, do not go that far. But they have all begun to get a grip on the concept of narrative in the image, of telling stories. the example here is from Wendy. She has incorporated anime into her image, because it is part of who she is (see the section from the image)

Why not try it yourself? Email your attempts to me (72dpi, max of 600 pixels across) and I will publish them.
I look forward to publishing posts!
Ka kite ano