Kenneth
Snelson: Panoramic Photographs
DeCordova and Dana
Museum And Park, Lincoln, Massachusetts, November - January 1985
Taft Museum, Cinncinnati,
Ohio, February - March 1985
Catalog Essay
By Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, Senior Curator
Kenneth Snelson
is a man of many interests who became widely known in the mid 1960s for
his sculptural work. He has also pursued research into the structure of
the atom and created a visually-arresting group of panoramic photographs,
the subject of this exhibition.
Snelson's sculptures,
which are based on the structural principles of tension and compression,
are comprised of aluminum or stainless steel tubes connected by taut steel
cables. The tubes by-pass each other without touching, seeming to float
effortlessly in space in varying geometric configurations. The sculptures
range in size from small indoor pieces that are three to four feet in
a dimension to large outdoor works that may extend up to 100 feet. The
artist's first experiments with what has been called "floating compression
structures," resulted from his contact with architect Buckminster Fuller
at Black Mountain College in North Carolina during the summers of 1948
and 1949. Snelson had initially studied painting and drawing at the Corcoran
School of Art and the University of Oregon, and then enrolled at Black
Mountain to study with former Bauhaus instructor Josef Albers. Encouraged
by Fuller's ideas of the geometry of structure, in 1948 Snelson experimented
with sculpture and developed a prototype for a floating compression structure.
He was credited by Fuller with inventing a new structural principle which
Fuller later named tensegrity (a contraction of "tension" and "integrity")
In the 1960s, Snelson's
investigations into the structure of the atom resulted in his first models
of the atom, patented in 1966 and then again in 1978. His theories, drawings,
and models of the atom were comprehensively presented in 1979 at the Maryland
Science Center in Baltimore in an exhibition entitled, "Portrait of an
Atom."
That Snelson's third
main body of work is in the medium of photography is perhaps to be expected
from a man who worked as a motion picture cameraman for fifteen years
and who is the son of a camera shop owner. As a youth, Snelson occasionally
accompanied his father to local businesses in Pendleton, Oregon, to take
group portraits of employees. 3 They used a Cirkut camera which rotates
on a tripod and could therefore encompass groups of people assembled in
relatively narrow rooms. Snelson still has one of the panoramic cameras
used by his father.
Snelson's first
experimentation with the panoramic format dates to 1951 when he was in
Paris studying at Fernand Leger's Academie Montmartre. Seven photographs
taken in the Bois de Boulogne are pieced together to form a picture of
boys playing in the park. Although the image is not a true panorama (each
photograph was taken at a different time from a different vantage point),
the strip format, emphasis on geometric pattern, and the push/pull of
forms both close to and far away from the surface plane prefigure Snelson's
later panoramas. Snelson's use of a scroll-like, horizontal format in
BOIS DE BOULOGNE is related to his interest in Chinese art at the time.
Between 1952 and
1968, while working as a motion picture cameraman on documentary films,
Snelson produced a different type of panorama. The term "pan" in filmmaking,
short for panorama, describes the camera rotating to take in the scene.
It was not until 1975, however, when Snelson and his family were in Berlin
under the auspices of a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Fellowship,
that his desire to experiment with photography was rekindled by an old
box camera he found at a flea market. Nostalgia led him to try to re-experience
his father's shop" by attempting to acquire all the cameras his father
had in the showcase of his store. With the purchase of a Widelux camera
in 1975, Snelson initiated a series of color Cibachrome photographs taken
in Paris.
Panoramas first
appeared in painted form in 1787 when Robert Barker produced a circular
painting of Edinburgh which was "arranged around the perimeter of a rotunda
in such a way as to make the spectator feel in the midst of the scene."
4 By 1822 Jacques Daguerre and his partner, the painter Charles Bouton,
produced the Diorama, "a succession of scenes painted on a canvas which
was caused to pass before the observer, or else the observer himself was
slowly moved before the paintings." 5 The subjects of these Dioramas were
often great battles and historical events. By the 1840s the fever for
painted panoramic views had developed in the United States, where depictions
of far-off places and dramatic vistas were produced as mechanized painted
panoramas revolving before a seated audience who simultaneously listened
to an explanatory travelogue. 6 By the mid-nineteenth century photographers
had created panoramas by combining multiple daguerreotypes in an overlapping
horizontal format, using ordinary box cameras and moving the camera for
each exposure in order to take in a 3600 field of vision. Famous views
of the Ohio River and Cincinnati, Niagara Falls, the Rocky Mountains,
and San Francisco during the days of the Gold Rush were taken at this
time. Diana Eckins has pointed out that:
... the panoramic
photograph differed from a painted panorama in its attention to contemporary
events, though the nature of the subjects - battles and views of famous
or exotic places - were often similar ' Also similar was the incredible
labor involved in its execution. 7
In 1845, Friedrich von Martens, an engraver living in Paris, developed
a camera which made it possible to take a 1500 daguerreotype view on a
single plate. Considering that the human eye covers a field of vision
of approximately 60' and early daguerreotype cameras only 45', this was
an important breakthrough. The Eastman Kodak Company marketed a camera
based on similar principles, the Kodak Panoram, in 1899. In this camera
the lens moves in an arc in front of a curved film plane. Snelson has
used modern versions of this type of panoramic camera, particularly the
Widelux, to take 140' views that are then pieced together to provide a
complete circuit.
Another camera manufactured
by Eastman was the Cirkut, invented at the turn of the century, but no
longer on the market. The Cirkut has a small motor which rotates the entire
camera on a tripod while the film is driven in the opposite direction
past a slit at the same speed, enabling the photographer to take views
of 360' or more. Snelson's large black and white prints of New York City
are taken with the Cirkut camera, and he also uses a contemporary version
called the Hulcherama.
Snelson approaches
photography with an enthusiasm and a technical ingenuity that is characteristic
of all he does. Just as his investigations into the physical properties
of structure resulted in the development of the principle of tensegrity,
so his desire to record a particular kind of space led him to modify the
Cirkut camera. He found the horizon line of most panoramic cameras too
low for his urban views of New York City, consequently he rebuilt the
front of the Cirkut camera so that the lens board could be set at different
heights relative to the film plane, enabling him to raise the horizon
line. In order to process the large black and white negatives taken with
a Cirkut camera, some of which are almost ten feet wide, Snelson built
an elaborate contact printer.
What attracts people
to the panorama? Snelson believes that "the instinct to check out everything
around you is fairly primitive." When asked to explain his motivation,
he said, "the panoramas come out of a voyeuristic impulse, a desire to
see in all directions at once." 9 A 360' panorama does provide a field
of vision which is impossible to take in with the human eye in one glance.
For the same reason that the mid-nineteenth century public was awestruck
by the Diorama and other large painted and photographed panoramas, so
the contemporary viewer is amazed by the amount of detail and depth of
field available in a photographic panorama. While flat panoramas are mathematically
consistent, straight lines that angle away from the camera become curved
because the image is flat. This slight distortion adds to the fascination
of the photograph, which evinces both abstracted space and realistic detail
in an unusual combination.
It is significant
that Snelson's interest in painting peaked with Cubism. For his photographs
provide, in their own way, a multiplicity of view that is indebted to
Cubism, with numerous subjects contained in each panorama. According to
Snelson, the order in the panoramas "is an attempt to find an on-going
geometrical liveliness" and he is "not happy with them unless they work
abstractly." Yet he a;so sees beyond their abstract qualities to their
function as documents of the contemporary city, as "...kind of a picture-for
the-future of what the city was like." 10
Cities, rather than
natural landscape, appeal to Snelson as subject matter because they have
more architectural and geometric elements, with their abundance of intersections,
courtyards, bridges, and plazas. BROOKLYN BRIDGE, 1980, is very much a
contrast of the arcing, dark, convex shape of the Brooklyn Bridge with
the New York City skyline behind it in the right half of the image and
a more open, tonal, distant view of the Manhattan Bridge on the left.
Viewers are further confounded in their reading of these panoramas since
the beginning and end of a flattened 360' view are the same point. In
the cibachrome prints, accents of color and an occasional human figure
add to the number of elements that affect the visual reading of the image.
Snelson is not interested
in photographing pure landscape because it does not offer the density
of forms that he seeks. In a panorama of a natural landscape it is difficult
if not impossible to tell whether what is represented is a true panorama
or a cropped section of a large photograph. Even in the more rural photograph
of MOHONK IN FOG, 1980, Snelson chose to concentrate on the forms of boathouses,
canoes, benches, and docks rather than the lake. While human figures occasionally
appear as accents, Snelson is generally not interested in photographing
people. In order to be able to photograph in the cities of New York, Paris,
and Venice without including people in the image, Snelson is out on the
street by 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning. He has speculated that photographing
Venice without people is a way to have Venice for himself and to provide
the viewer with the same vicarious experience. There is, of course, a
practical reason for not including people in photographs taken with the
Cirkut camera. The camera takes 40 seconds to make its complete circuit,
any moving people or cars would appear as a blur, an effect Snelson does
not want.
Because of Snelson's
seemingly diverse interests, he has often been asked what the connection
is between his photography and his other pursuits. He believes that his
endeavors are related by an attempt to "chip the Plaster off surfaces
of things and find out what the structure underneath is about." The word
"connection" is a key to understanding his work, for Snelson seeks "a
universe of correspondences" arrived at through an investigation of the
underlying principles of structure. If we look for more specific comparisons,
the many views offered in his panoramas can be equated with the multiple
views provided by his sculptures. And just as his structures of compression
and tension and his models of the atom are concerned with the aesthetics
and mechanics of structure, so too the panoramas, in their wealth of visual
detail, reveal the underlying framework of the environment. The connecting
of tubes and cables can be compared to the visual or physical connection
of the two ends of the panorama to form a complete circle. The integrity
of Snelson's forms is essential, if a cable of one of the sculptures is
cut, the structure would collapse,- similarly, if the center of a panorama
were cut out we would be missing a vital connecting link. Thus, not only
are Snelson's varied interests fundamentally connected, but so is his
approach to their execution and his ability to expand existing scientific
and technical knowledge to meet his needs.
Rachel Rosenfield
Lafo
Senior Curator
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