I have been shooting panoramas since 1984. At the outset I attempted to produce as seamless a vision as possible using a cut and splice method. My photographic technique was to make each shot just overlap, preferably at a post or tree, but if that was not possible, I’d take whatever break happened and piece it together—all manually!
Then came a trip to Italy in the summer of 2004. My friend Amy Archer remarked that in Tuscany one need only hold a camera at random and click the shutter to make a lovely photograph. The challenge was then to do something different. I set the goal to shoot my panoramas as a series of sequenced individual shots, each one balanced and proportioned independent of the others in the sequence. For the next six months I worked on the product of that trip, combining photographs in a variety of ways, mostly single sequenced panoramas.
Today, all my photography is based upon the format of individual shots sequenced. What I discovered is that this form mimics how a viewer will look across a wide field of vision. We seldom take in the whole—it is often too wide. What we do is turn our head and find ourselves captured by points of interest in the focal field. We hesitate for a moment on that focus and in fact, drag it with us as we continue to turn our heads—most often for westerners, from left to right, which I take into account by following that same direction in the arc across the field or alter to alienate the viewer’s perception.
As I shifted from taking snapshots—even panoramic snapshots—to becoming an art photographer my interest in what I looked for shifted. Once I became interested in the look of the document, not just what it documented, I reflected upon the influences of my visual development. I found that my starting point was not within photography at all, but from my experiences with abstract painting—Mondrian, Malevich, Rothko, Braque--and the impressionist predecessors—Van Gogh, Cezanne, Turner. I also found Escher intriguing—the illusions of vision.
My attention to photographers—though I have always looked at photographs—was awakened from two sources. One was from Amy Archer. She taught me that the vision can be whole without any object in the vision being whole. The second source, the one that lead me to study photography more closely, happened while flying to L.A., looking at a flight magazine. There was an ad for a new book by James Balog, Trees. The images shown were the first instance of seeing another photographer using single sequenced images to produce an experience of looking. Awakened to other photographers I realized my connections to others: Edward Weston’s purity of form; David Levinthal’s point of focus; Barbara Crane’s constructions; Sara Cedar Miller’s panoramic portraits of rooms; Andreas Gursky’s all encompassing visions that demand a viewer search and make connections; and David Hilliard whose work in sequenced panoramas suggests the possibility for narratives.
The guiding principal in most all of my shoots is to capture what I find as I move into an environment. In that sense it is documentary. I do not arrange objects, I do not direct people. For me, the camera is an extension of discovery; the creation is capturing the experience of that moment. Seldom do I use a tripod; seldom do I remain in a fixed position to await the next moment. In fact, most of my pans are shot only once. I have seen, studied, measured, and shot, and it is time to move on. While I would love to “be there” on the perfect day, I feel almost any day is perfect; what is there at any moment is giving life (and beauty) to the present existence; it is enough.
Myron Filene
March 2007