Archives West Finding Aid

The panorama photograph has been around almost as long as photography. From the beginning photographers wanted to be able to show city scenes which could not be encompassed in a satisfactory way by one view from a normal camera. A photograph of the city skyline taken with a regular camera was generally too far away to show the detail in a meaningful way. Photographers started making panoramas by photographing the city skyline in a series of images which were then shown placed next to each other to create one image. Some views in the 1850s used as many as eleven full size (8 ½" x 61/2") daguerreotype plates to create the scene. Later in the 1860s, panoramas were printed onto paper from large glass plate negatives which were sometimes as big as 20"x 24." One later master of the panoramic print was H.H. Bennett, who could print three or four 20" x 24" sized negatives onto an enormous sheet of paper with almost no indication of where the negative edges met. Bennett's photographs were of the scenery along the river in the Wisconsin Dells. Specialized panoramic camera designs were being patented and manufactured for making panoramas from the ca. 1840s onwards. Since the negative was so long, a special camera was necessary to hold the film. There were two types of cameras for panoramas, one had a lens that rotated while the film remained still and the other had both rotating lens and rotating film. In 1899, Kodak introduced the #4 Kodak Panoram panoramic camera for amateur photographers. These photographs were about 12” long and had a field of view that was 180°. In 1904, the Cirkut camera was introduced. This camera was based on the principles that had been established in the 1840s. It became a popular format for commercial photographers and was used to make large group portraits and city scenes. It used large film that ranged from 5” to 16” wide and could be as long as 20 feet! Both the camera and the film rotated and the view could be as wide as 360°. This type of panorama however, produced a distorted the view of the scene. A street scene would have both sides of the street apparently placed parallel with the straight street appearing curved around in front. Panoramas made from a series of negatives placed together do not have this distortion.

The Banquet camera was a smaller verision of the panorama which made images that were 12"x20" and 8"x20." It was called a "Banquet" camera because it was often used to photograph groups at banquets.