A 'proper point of view': The panorama and some of its early media iterations

The panorama entered the world not as a visual format but as a claim: to lure viewers into seeing in a particular way. Robert Barker's 1787 patent for a 360-degree painting of 'nature at a glance' (Nature a Coup d'Oeil) emphasized the construction of a 'proper point of view' as a means of making the viewer 'feel as if really on the spot'. This situating strategy would, over the following centuries, take many forms within the world of the painted panorama and its photographic, magic lantern, and cinematic counterparts. This essay charts some of the unexpected twists and turns of this strategy, exploring among others the moving panorama (both as a parallel development to the cinematic moving picture and as deployed by the film medium as a background to suggest movement) and the relations between the spatial promise of the late nineteenth-century stereoscope and that most populous of early motion picture titles, the panorama. The essay focuses on changing technologies and strategies for achieving Barker's initial goals, while attending to the implications for the viewer. Drawing from the observations of scholars as diverse as Bentham, Foucault, and Crary, the essay uses the various iterations of the panorama to explore the implications of a particularly rich strand of technologies of seeing.