Eadweard Muybridge Takes San Francisco Panorama
Muybridge's 1877 Photos Capture Architecture, Layout of a Bay City
Nov 9, 2008
Shooting from atop railroad magnate Mark Hopkins' home on hilly California Street, Muybridge captured the 50-mile long x 15-mile wide city in a 360-degree panorama. His 1877 panoramas were titled Panorama of San Francisco, from California Street Hill. The first was made from 11 prints and folded like an accordion to fit inside a presentation album that was 9"x12". When unfolded, the panorama was about 7 1/2 feet long. As an album it sold for ten dollars and came with a "key and index" that identified more than 200 places. Unmounted and rolled up, it sold for eight dollars.
Since Muybridge was perhaps more driven to have a product that sold well rather than by a need to create a photographic record of the city for posterity, he identified the homes of wealthy citizens and a smorgasbord of other sites, including the U. S. Mint, City Hall, the Colored Church (two), the Jewish Synagogue, the sugar refinery, the San Miguel mountains, the Catholic Cemetery, the Ladies Protection Relief building, Alcatraz Island, Chinatown, the Masonic and Odd Fellows' Halls, the Post Office, U. S. Courts, and the horse stables of railroad magnate Leland Stanford.
Second Panorama; Was There a Third?
The second panorama was created from 11 images also, but the photos were printed on individual 5"x 8" cards, each with a border. When placed side-by-side they presented a panoramic view. The 1877 panoramas were not identical. Cropping and sometimes shooting more than one photo per sector made the panoramas slightly different, explained David Harris and Eric Sandweiss in the book Eadweard Muybridge and the Photographic Panorama of San Francisco, 1850-1880. (For a discussion about how to determine in which month the panoramas were shot, see the above-mentioned book and the Paul Falconer article cited in Sources.)
Because 1877 promotional literature did not mention the card set, Harris and Sandweiss conclude that it was produced after the album panorama. They also conclude that the photos for both panoramas were taken either on the same day or within a few days of each other and that at least once the photos were erroneously switched. In the 1877 promotional literature, Muybridge mentions the availability of a 20-foot-long panorama of fourteen 16"x24" panels folded vertically. No copies of this panorama have been found. The negatives might have been destroyed in the early 1878 fire that destroyed the negatives for the other panoramas as well as those of his Mexico and Central America trip.
For this reason, he made another panorama in 1878.
Sources:.
Falconer, Paul A. "Muybridge's Window to the Past: A Wet-plate View of San Francisco in 1877." California History 57 (Summer 1978): 130-157.
Harris, David. ed. Eadweard Muybridge and the Photographic Panorama of San Francisco, 1850-1880. Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture. 1993.
Related Article:
E. Muybridge's San Francisco Panorama, 1878
