Circular Photos (or Views from the Convex Helmet Shield)

George Eastman on board S.S. Gallia, 1890, by Frederick Church

A few years ago I was lying in the grass staring up the sky when I made the seemingly obvious discovery that my vision is circular. Our eyes are round, the earth is round, even camera lenses are round – but after years of taking pictures I’d failed to notice that my vision was round too. After that I started telling friends that I was going to start taking circular pictures. I haven’t followed up on this threat, but it still seems like a good idea. There was a time, after all, when this was perfectly acceptable:

Sir John Herschel’s photogenic drawing of telescope at Slough, 1839

Portrait of boy and girl in colonial costume, ca. 1860, by Oscar Rejlander

Telescopic View of Full Moon by Briggs Co. (active 1868-1930)

Ellen Terry at Age Sixteen, 1863, by Julia Margaret Cameron

Unknown photographer, circa 1890. These images were taken with a vest camera. Designed by R.D. Gray in 1885, the vest camera was a disc form fitted behind a rigid false shirt front with a lens that, disguised as a button, passed through the front. Six exposures could be made on the glass plate, rotated by a knob which also passed through the front.

In the late-sixties Emmet Gowin gave the circle another shot. In his 1976 monograph, Photographs, he writes:

About the circular pictures: I had quite forgotten that it was the nature of the lens to form a circle and in 1967 my only lens was a short Angulon intended for a small camera. I’d been given an old Eastman View 8×10 and brought the two together out of impatience and curiosity. After a while, I recognized the wonderful exaggeration near the edge. I began to use the camera with the lens, but for several years I would trim these prints so that the circle was disguised. Eventually I realized that such a lens contributed to a particular description of space and that the circle itself was already a powerful form.

Accepting the entire circle, what the camera had made, was important to me. It involved recognition of the inherent nature of things. I had set out to describe the world with my domain, to live a quality with things. Enrichment, I saw, involves a willingness to accept a changing vision of the nature of things – which is to say, reality. Often I had thought that things teach me what to do. Now I would prefer to say: As things reach us what we already are, we gain a vision of the world.

Danville, Virginia 1973 by Emmet Gowin

After Gowin, most circular photographs appear to be staged or experimental:

Little Children III, 1988, by Jeff Wall

Man, 1993, by John Priola

Attracted to Light C, 1996-2000, by Doug & Mike Starn

Bubble, 2001, by Mariko Mori

Nachtphoto, 1992 by Thomas Ruff

Last Riot 2 (tondo #3), 2005, by AES + F

I’m looking for more circular photographs. Please send names, links or anything else that comes to mind.