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All-Embracing Camera
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20164 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1992 |
1,230 Words |
| Author
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Larry R. Thall
Larry R. Thall is a photography writer for the Chicago
Tribune and former managing editor of Photomethods magazine |
Developing a distinctive, instantly recognizable style is a requisite goal for artists working in any medium. Panoramic photographers, however, arguably have the most difficult time fulfilling this universal creative aspiration. Created with cameras typically featuring horizontal angles of views ranging from 140 to 360 degrees, panoramic photographs tend to bombard viewers with visual minutiae, while their monumental vistas--usually of majestic landscapes, city skylines, or mass gatherings of people--tend to limit the latitude for creative composition on the part of the photographer.
The great geographical expanse covered by the camera's lens can even place restrictions on the type and time of day a photographer shoots. Scenes that alternate repeatedly between bright sunlight and deep shadow--as is often the case in early morning and late afternoon--are extremely difficult to print well. So, many panoramas are made either on overcast days or around midday.
These obstacles not withstanding, Cincinnati photographer Jane Alden Stevens has overcome the mechanical and aesthetic limitations of her panoramic instrument to create a style uniquely her own. Ironically, Stevens has chosen a quite limited scope for her all-embracing 160-degree camera. Instead of working in the medium's traditional grand scale, Stevens concentrates on making psychologically oriented portraits of one or two persons at a time, posed in commonplace rural settings.
At first glance, many of Stevens' images--such as a girl leaning against the side of a house or two children sleeping in a hammock--appear visually and technically simple, almost mimicking snapshots. However, their apparent simplicity is quite deceiving. For instance, Stevens, thirty-nine, who photographed for many years with traditional format cameras, had to completely reorient her mind's-eye view of the world to the atavistic proportions of an instrument manufactured approximately fifty years before her birth.
Instead of mentally composing the universe in rectangles or squares proportionate to the popular 35mm or 6-by-6-centimeter formats she formerly used, Stevens aesthetically now had to think in terms of 5-by-14-inch strips, the film size of her AL-Vista, Model 5D panoramic cameras. The camera's lack of a proper viewfinder made her visual adjustment infinitely more difficult. Located atop the box-like camera, the AL-Vista's viewfinder window swivels in an arc similar to that of the camera's lens, which during an exposure swings, almost in a semicircle, across the camera's curved film plane.
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