April 7 – 30, 2005
My fascination with the 360-degree photograph is its unique circumstance to display all the information surrounding a single position and one’s capacity to hold this point of view in a single glance. Each scene takes on new meaning in this way. Each landscape held in context to its surroundings reveals an integrity and veracity that doesn’t exist with standard modes of photography. The photographs are contemporaneous views of the American West from a perspective rarely noticed.
I use an unusual camera system with conventional lenses and film. Using eyesight alone, without a mechanical viewing system the scene is positioned onto the film plane. In a single exposure the camera rotates around a circle while film passes behind an opened shutter to record the scene. The print presents a complete view, prompting one to imagine that world in a single glance, as it otherwise would wrap around them.
in the photographs. The totality of the landscape is essential to each composition. I’m intrigued by the spatial quality of 360-degree photography and even more by the field work itself. There are no insignificant parts of a scene.
I exist in a world that surrounds me, yet I’m predisposed to limitations that cognitively suggest otherwise. I’ve been trained from the earliest age to notice what is directly in front of me, to accentuate the meritorious and make extraneous the rest, to mentally construe a world bound by left and right like a viewing screen and from day to day I consider the world from this vantage point. So I’m compelled to consider an image less than 360-degrees as if it were the entire world and the 360-degree image that wraps entirely around a point a view as if it were bounded by a perspective of left and right and confined by that dimension.
When I come to photograph a place my inclination is to regard the greater part a scene as insignificant and accentuate only a few of its aspects. My basic visual training and physical structure draw me away from considering the 360-degree view, to focus on less expansive and arguably more interesting features. However, through this approach my perception serves more perhaps to obscure a scene’s significance than present it. And caught up with detail, I hold in my mind something quite different than what plainly lies before me. Between what exists and what I’m practiced to perceive lies a gap where the reality of each scene may well be left behind.
Sensing some futility in this approach I’ve learned to resist my inclinations. I became disposed to natural patterns the environment creates and resides in and conscious of my relationships therein. At first I found it difficult to hold and consider a scene in its entirety, as it extends beyond my peripheral vision. Initially I came to understand the elements involved in conceptualizing space around me as linear and fragmented. I learned to disrupt that approach, to perceive my position relative to patterns that wrap around me and as they exist contiguously. Scenes take on new meaning in this way. I move in relation to these patterns, through and among objects with considerations to view and a perspective that regards an entire field. I’m neither on one side nor another, nor between two or more, but move from center to center to become aware of a much greater vision at work with a cognitive sense of sight rather than by eyesight alone.
The 360-degree photograph allows me to step out and away from behind a linear framework to experience my interaction with the landscape, the relationships that bind it around me and me to it.
The complete panorama presents a vision that is challenging. It expands the breadth of visual literacy. It adds dimension and context to what I perceive and what I envision.