CITY PANORAMAS
In 1990 Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco asked me to make a new panorama of the city based on Eadweard Muybridge’s mammoth plate panorama from 1878. The new panorama was made from the hotel now occupying the original location used by Muybridge, and became the first in several city panoramas that followed.
Barcelona Panoramas
The Barcelona panoramas were made in 2011 from a vantage point to the west of the city on a high point called Miramar on Montjuic. This compelling vantage point has been used for centuries as a place to survey the city, and the City Archives in Barcelona have images dating back to at least the 1500’s. I made two versions of the city panorama. In one, the contemporary view of the city becomes the matrix into which historical views of the same space are embedded. In the second, a nineteenth century panorama of the city becomes the matrix in which to embed both contemporary and historic views of the same space.
The project was sponsored by the Barcelona Photographic Archive, The Arqueologia del Punt de Vista and the Barcelona Institute. I am especially grateful to Ricard Martinez for this opportunity.
Panorama of contemporary Barcelona with embedded historic images, 2011.
Panorama of Barcelona with contemporary and historic images embedded, based on a view by Jean Laurent ca 1870.
San Francisco, 1990
Muybridge, Panorama of San Francisco, 1878
This panorama of San Francisco was made from suites with balconies near the top of the Mark Hopkins Intercontinental Hotel which now rests on the location originally used by Eadweard Muybridge to make his 1878 mammoth plate view. Muybridge chose for his vantage point the copula of the Hopkins residency which was at the time the highest point in the city. After he made a smaller version of the panorama in 1877, he returned the next year to make this larger view (24x20” wet plates were used and each plate had to be coated, exposed and developed on site). The panorama is comprised of thirteen separate vertical photographs trimmed to give the illusion of one continuous panorama. Muybridge carefully planned his work and each plate was made in succession from left to right over the course of the day, except there was one plate that is out of sequence. One can see from the lighting that plate number six was made at a later time of day that the surrounding photographs. No one is sure why this happened. A broken plate? Need for a better exposure? Or just to be tricky? But the replacement was an important lesson: a panorama is essentially a map of space, and once established any part of that map may be replaced at another time. I used this lesson on the Washington panorama made a few years later.
Union Square
San Francisco, 2003
For the project titled After the Ruins, I rephotographed locations through the city of San Francisco that had been devastated by the 1906 earthquake and fire. This panorama was made from the top of the St Francis Hotel at Union Square in 2003 and repeats the location of two panoramas made from the same location, one made during the fire that destroyed much of San Francisco’s downtown, and one after when approximately a third of the city was reduced to rubble in 1906. The hotel survived the destruction.
Washington DC, 1992-93
The Washington panorama was made for the Smithsonian American Art Museum and I worked with curator Merry Foresta on an exhibition and book of the final work. After researching historic panoramas of the city and potential sites, we chose the vantage point offered by the clock tower of the historic Post Office building, at that time in the domain of the National Park Service and home to the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities. I completed a 360° panorama of the city from that location in September of 1992. But in that year the election brought a change in government when Bill Clinton was elected president, so I began thinking about how to employ the lesson from Muybridge and use replacement photographs of the scene in Washington to extend the panorama’s time period. I returned in January of 1993 and was able to make photographs of the inaugural parade including the view down Pennsylvania Avenue and the Capitol Dome (done with difficulty because of the sensitive nature of this location for security). I later returned in the spring of 1993 to complete the right half of the panorama so that the final view would be made over three seasons and two administrations. The White House appears twice in both the far left and far right views. Additionally, the idea behind the panorama was that any single part of the panorama could be remade if and when the city changes. Thus in this version, there is a view below the single line of the panorama’s images that was made during the previous administration in 1992, and another above the line that was made two years later in 1995 when construction on the Regan Building was completed.
Related:
National Museum of American Art,
Washington, 1994