Great Wide Open: Panoramic Photographs of the American West, The

Graphis, Sep/Oct 2001 by Birnbaum, Andrea

The Great Wide Open: Panoramic Photographs of the American West

The panoramic format is the mini-skirt of photography: both sent shivers down the spine of an entire culture with their debut. And ever since, their "comebacks" are proclaimed so often you'd never know they went away. Both also redefined our perspective on length, and set new standards for just what is acceptable to reveal. Since the medium's earliest days (the first panoramic photo was made by displaying several daguerreotypes side by side), photographers have invented and reinvented the format, using its wide dimensions to tell a longer story, and embracing the unique shape it takes on the page.

The Great Wide Open: Panoramic Photographs of the American West presents a broad selection of historic and contemporary photographs, tracing the evolution of the Western landscape and exploring variations on the panorama's application. Spanning roughly 150 years, this overview of the long view looks at mountain ranges, rolling prairies, mining towns, and bustling cities. Its subjects range from a visitor at Portage Glacier, Alaska to a bread line for unemployed migrant workers, with the expressive faces of many men, women and children in between.

Included are many of the old-timers-William Henry Jackson, Carleton E. Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge-who were lucky enough to come along just as national attention was shifting toward Western expansion. This happily coincided with technical breakthroughs in photography, and gave way to the creation of many early iconic landscape images. The Great Wide Open explores the simultaneous progression in technology and Western settlement by juxtaposing the past with the present, interspersing classic (now sometimes read as cliche) dramatic open vistas with works by Catherine Opie, Lois Conner and other contemporary photographers that continue to stretch the limits of what fits in the frame.

Opie, known for exposing the sex scene of San Francisco in the '80s, has turned her wide-angle lens to the labyrinth of Los Angeles freeways. Taken out of context they appear almost sculptural, engaging viewers to explore every surface and curve. John Huggins comments on the "new frontier" with Roadscape #96 (1991), depicting a distorted stretch of asphalt and a pair of cows roaming between telephone poles, with truncated mountains in the distance.

I'm still not convinced by arguments claiming the panorama gives a more accurate representation of the world as we see it. To me, the picture is less complete as it becomes more obvious that something's missing-great expanses of sky are often cropped out, and sometimes that elongated shape is downright awkward. But this collection attests to its precision for detail and its playfulness, while affording an optimistic outlook on our ever-expanding creativity.

By Claudia Bohn-Spector & Jennifer A. Watts. Published by Merrell in association with The Huntington Library, 2001. 160 pages, 75 of illustrations. 11-13/16" x 7-718" $50, Hardcover.