As I began to research Willème’s photosculpture process, I also started thinking about his circular photography room: his glass-domed circular pavilion that allowed an object to be photographed in the round. Willème’s pavilion offered an inverse view to that of its predecessors, the camera obscura pavilion and the panorama pavilion, both of which presented an outward rather than inward view. Willème’s pavilion, meanwhile, encircled a central object, in exactly the same way as a contemporary 3D scanner. This presented a major departure from what had existed beforehand: photographs taken from a single, pivoting point of view. I started to research possible photographic vantage points and their effects on 3D printing.

During my historical research, I have come across many experiments connected to photography that apply very different vantage points. The camera obscura pavilion brought the outside world inside: its design channelled a ray of light through a small aperture into a dark space, projecting an upside-down image of the outside onto the opposing wall, functioning as a cinema in real-time. As such, it reversed the perspective position of the viewer, facing away from the actual landscape to instead look at an opposing mirror image.

While the camera obscura pavilion projected the exterior landscape of its immediate surroundings, the panorama pavilion imported its images from distant places of wonder. Devised by Irish painter Robert Barker in 1785 and patented in 1787, this large, circular landscape painting gave the hyper-realistic illusion of a real, three-dimensional, 360-degree view, radically changing the viewer’s point of perspective as they entered the space. [fig. 27] The physical environment of his panorama evoked a real place somewhere else, giving the viewer a sense of being within the represented location. The latest inventions were used in order to create a panorama painting. The painter would, once in their chosen location, use a special revolving camera obscura mounted on a tripod to make topographic tracings and atmospheric studies of the surrounding view. This comprehensive survey was used in the construction of the painting. The drawings were transferred onto a glass cylinder or onto glass plates that were projected through convex lenses by a strong light source, such as a magic lantern.¹ This projection was then traced and transferred onto a large canvas with a system of quadrants. Then, the artist painted a distorted, cylindrical perspective at life-size, creating an uncanny reproduction of reality. So that this circular panoramic painting appeared to be without beginning or end, the building was adapted to house a staircase leading up to a raised viewing platform at the centre of the cylinder.² This viewing platform ensured that viewers remained approximately 10 meters away from the painting, giving multiple vantage points, but always from a distance. Upon arriving in the viewing circle, disorientated and slightly blinded by the sudden daylight, the spectators experienced a moment of feeling as though they were somewhere else entirely. Although the panorama pavilion was more or less imitating the effects of the camera obscura pavilion, it went beyond its predecessor, improving the experience with its 360-degree view and myriad vantage points.

A few other marvels of the time also helped to broaden the horizon of vantage points. Etienne-Louis Boullée’s Cenotaph for Isaac Newton, engraved and made public in 1784 but never realised, proposed a sphere of 150 meters in diameter that was pierced by countless holes in the vaulting that, when illuminated by the sun, gave the illusion of stars in the night sky. [fig. 28] Although the structure was never built, it suggested the idea of an even wider expanded view, of peering from the horizon into the darkness of space, as in the modern planetarium. In 1826, Charles François Paul Delanglard built a structure in Paris that went further still: a full 360 x 180-degree spherical panorama painting. [fig. 29] In this géorama, visitors would look from a platform onto an inverted image of the earth, from a viewpoint situated in the volcanic core of the planet. Similarly, in James Wyld’s Great Globe, which had opened together with the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, visitors could gaze at an inverted map of the world. [fig. 30] The Great Globe was a purpose-built hall with four elevated platforms, from which the viewer could see a full panoramic sphere of 26 meters in diameter. On its interior surface was an inverted surface of the earth, complete with three-dimensional mountain ranges and rivers in plaster.³ The spectator was no longer looking upon a comprehensible globe but found himself inside a panoramic orb.

At the Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Paris of 1900, the experience of the panorama painting was taken to new extremes by the new medium of cinema. Underneath the Eiffel Tower stood Raoul Grimion-Sanson’s Cinéorama, an early type of panoramic projection. [fig. 31] It brought the ideas behind the camera obscura and panorama pavilions together with the new cinema technology. Upon entering the pavilion, visitors experienced an effect similar to that of the panorama pavilion, rising from a darkened tunnel over a spiral staircase onto a circular platform. The platform resembled a large balloon basket that could hold up to 150 spectators and was roped to the lower part of a hot-air balloon, giving the impression that the visitors were stepping inside a real hot-air balloon, moments away from ascension. Instead of looking onto a painted panorama, they were surrounded by ten blank canvasses of nine square meters. Underneath the platform was a projection booth that held 10 synchronized 70mm movie projectors arranged in a circle, so that, when projected, the films appeared to be joined together, creating a 360-degree panoramic cinema. As the projection began, the platform seemed to ascend, giving visitors the impression that the balloon was lifting them hundreds of meters above the neighbouring Tuileries Gardens.⁴ The experience centred on the physical sensation of rising and viewing the perspective. The Cinéorama had lifted earthly perspective.

Félix Nadar had taken the first aerial photographs in 1858 from his own hot-air balloon. Nadar wrote that viewing the Earth’s surface from above ‘reduces all things to their relative proportions — to the truth’. Truth is a big word, but photography and film had radically changed conventional vantage points. In 1874, for instance, James Nasmyth and James Carpenter prefigured a lunar point of view in a marvellous hybrid illustration.⁵ [fig. 32] They made plaster models of the moon’s surface that were carefully lit to simulate lunar conditions, which were then photographed for reproduction. These images of plaster lunar photo-sets constructed an artificial viewpoint from the moon’s surface. One of their chromolithographs even shows a solar eclipse ‘as it would appear as seen from the moon’.⁶ These fantasised images of a lunar perspective were, like the balloon flight, in line with the aspirations of the time: to keep flying onwards. A bird’s eye view was unattainable before the invention of the hot-air balloon but had long been imagined. Soon after, reality followed fantasy, in the form of aerial photographs and films with multiple, newly acquired points of view.

It is precisely this point vantage point, from the moon to the earth, which interested me in my own experiments. It reduced the planet to a comprehensible size, and this relative proportion could then be transferred to the photosphere as an object to be looked at from afar.