1990 & 2003
Panorama of San Francisco after Muybridge
In 1990 Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco asked me to make a new panorama of the city based on Eadweard Muybridge’s mammoth plate panorama from 1878. The new panorama was made from the hotel now occupying the original location used by Muybridge, and became the first in several city panoramas that followed.
San Francisco, 1990
Muybridge, Panorama of San Francisco, 1878
This panorama of San Francisco was made from suites with balconies near the top of the Mark Hopkins Intercontinental Hotel which now rests on the location originally used by Eadweard Muybridge to make his 1878 mammoth plate view. Muybridge chose for his vantage point the copula of the Hopkins residency which was at the time the highest point in the city. After he made a smaller version of the panorama in 1877, he returned the next year to make this larger view (24x20” wet plates were used and each plate had to be coated, exposed and developed on site). The panorama is comprised of thirteen separate vertical photographs trimmed to give the illusion of one continuous panorama. Muybridge carefully planned his work and each plate was made in succession from left to right over the course of the day, except there was one plate that is out of sequence. One can see from the lighting that plate number six was made at a later time of day that the surrounding photographs. No one is sure why this happened. A broken plate? Need for a better exposure? Or just to be tricky? But the replacement was an important lesson: a panorama is essentially a map of space, and once established any part of that map may be replaced at another time. I used this lesson on the Washington panorama made a few years later.
Union Square
San Francisco, 2003
For the project titled After the Ruins, I rephotographed locations through the city of San Francisco that had been devastated by the 1906 earthquake and fire. This panorama was made from the top of the St Francis Hotel at Union Square in 2003 and repeats the location of two panoramas made from the same location, one made during the fire that destroyed much of San Francisco’s downtown, and one after when approximately a third of the city was reduced to rubble in 1906. The hotel survived the destruction.
