Around We Go: Panoramas in Albuquerque
From its earliest days, panorama photography was used for city planning, as well as a military tool for capturing overviews of battlefields or enemy forts. Panorama photography was often accomplished by a regular camera using multiple metal or glass plates. A photographer would expose an image on a negative plate, replace it with another negative plate, rotate the camera several degrees, expose that negative, replace it, and so forth. To create the full image, a photographer aligned the photographs, matching the scenery from each frame with the next. It took a mastery of the camera and the photographic process, plus a strong mathematical foundation and an incredible eye to accomplish a seamless panoramic view.
The first panoramic camera, a camera specifically intended for the wide-angle format, was developed in 1843 with a swing-lens design, allowing a camera lens to rotate while the negative plate remained still. A hand crank moved the lens to the next position and the photographer could shoot several images on a single wide plate. Other panorama camera designs followed, including 360-degree cameras that rotated a full circle in a single exposure, but none were commercially successful until 1905 when the Cirkut hit the market.
Cirkut Cameras were sold by the Eastman Kodak Company, which did not invent the cameras but merged with the company that did, thereby winning the right to sell and further develop Cirkuts. Cirkut Cameras are still the largest format cameras ever commercially produced, able to create a negative that reached nearly six feet long and over a foot tall. These dimensions are possible because the film is flexible and winds itself in a drum behind the lens. The camera sits on a turntable and is operated with a motor -- like that of an old clock or a wind-up toy. A photographer winds the motor with a key, sets the shutter speed, and turns a switch at the back of the camera. The switch operates the motor, which turns a gear on the bottom of the camera that interlocks with a gear on the turntable, externally rotating the camera while internally winding the film. The film advances behind the narrow slot shutter, capturing an entire image in one single, long exposure. The cameras were popular and sold in a variety of sizes. Amateurs and professionals clamored for Cirkuts in its first decades, but by WWII, the novelty had worn off and Eastman Kodak ended the sale of the cameras in 1945.
From multi-plate images to today’s smartphone panoramas, the panoramic format intrigues viewers with its distortion and large-scale views. Straight roads are curved, ponds widen into lakes, and buildings start to bend because the distance between the subject and the camera lens changes as the lens rotates. This makes the photographs look rounded, sometimes taking on a fish-eye quality. “Around We Go” features Cirkut prints, some encompassing a full 360-degree view, from the Albuquerque Museum’s photo archives.
