Techniques for making panoramic photographs have been in use since about 1850. Is the digital panorama process simply an update to these methods?

No. There is inherent in the new process a significant break with the traditional approach: a digital panorama is innately a construction, whether what it depicts matches our perception of the "real" scene before the lens or not. While making a digital panorama, the illusion that is at the heart of photography--that reality is somehow magically drawn into a camera and then poured back out onto a piece of paper--becomes to the imagemaker an obvious white lie.

That is, in the process of making a digital panorama, our "willing suspension of disbelief" becomes quite clear. Where historical practices relating to panoramic images (such as the assembly of multiple photographic prints or the use of a special rotating camera) might still leave the illusion intact, the digital panorama-maker cannot hide from an awareness of the process of assembling and simulating an image.

What is the consequence of this fact? If the creator of the digital panorama knows that each source image can be manipulated digitally, or replaced with another image, and that just as simply the full panorama can be changed with seemingly no restrictions, then the entire simulated 360-degree view depicted in the image must be viewed as a constructed space.

Suddenly, the panorama-maker's role shifts from photographer to installation artist.

(Of course, we know our eyes and brains do this sort of space-construction all day long. We're just not very comfortable with that fact, and we can ignore it easily enough. The process used to make digital panoramas lays out each source image before us and shows us directly where the computer "stitching" takes place. This is more difficult to ignore.)

In a sense, simulation is not entirely alien to the older panoramic process. Many historical panoramas show the same person at the left and right edges of the image: by running behind the camera after being photographed, a quick jokester might reinsert his body before the camera again and appear twice in the pan.

There is a difference in character here, however: where our imagined jokester appears twice in an image recorded in about 60 seconds, there is no reason why a digital creator could not insert her own image multiple times using self portraits taken ten years apart. This could be followed by a process of placing these portraits into a space never actually visited. She might then change her own features subtly, perhaps change her clothing, the objects surrounding her, the reactions of onlookers, and so on.

In effect the digital panorama "space" becomes an empty cube, open with possibilities. The computer and camera serve as tools to fill this imagined venue. Anything within imagination is possible.

There is of course irony in this, as most digital panoramas seem "superreal," offering a perspective beyond that of normal human vision. Part of their appeal is the idea of seeing a 360-degree view all at once, an impossibility for human eyes. The irony derives from our expectation that a panorama should depict reality. (This is quite similar to the pre-conceptions viewers brought when seeing the earliest photographs.)

This prejudice trips us up and keeps us from what should be an easy understanding of visual virtual space. From the standpoint of aesthetics, virtual space and real space have no significant difference. Whatever an artist might communicate in one is possible in some form in the other.

In returning "full circle" to the early photographic practice of panorama-making, we can see a key aspect of the digital revolution.

Photographers placing daguerreotypes side-by-side to create the illusion of a view of a long mountainscape sought to re-present the real scene that lay before their camera. Photographers setting a Cirkut camera to rotate and record its circular trip sought the ultrareality of the 360-degree view. The artist's role in making a digital panorama, however, is no longer simply that of scene-recorder (although that sort of thing is easily done). Instead, the initial photographs are likely to be considered as source material, the artist free to produce any imagined digital manipulation (or not).

From this position of infinite possibility, the artist is left in the role of making aesthetic choices as to what will exist in this space. To contemporary eyes, it no longer matters whether any of that depicted is "real." (The digital photograph is generally assumed to be manipulated in any case.) The artist using the digital panorama is a space designer, creating a new place for us to look around, explore and consider.

Ted Fisher
6.30.01