In my own research, I wanted a greater degree of abstraction than the rectangular frame of a photograph could offer. The different perspectives from the camera obscura, the panorama pavilion, the Géorama, the Cinéorama, and the sketches of James Nasmyth offered more interesting possibilities. I started photographing panoramic landscapes in the round. These digital panoramic photographs were taken with an 8mm wide-angle camera and a special tripod equipped with a Nodal Ninja, which allows 360-degree pivoting without horizontal discrepancies. With six photographs recorded — four in the round, one from the sky, and one from the ground — a full photosphere of 360 x 180 degrees can be stitched together in one equirectangular panorama, using a software program such as PTGui.

With a full panoramic photosphere, different perspectives can then be explored. For instance, the photosphere can be rolled out as a flat image and viewed as a rectangular photograph. From there, the panorama can be folded back into a sphere, which you can view from within, much like the photographer’s point of view, or from outside, as from a lunar perspective. It could also be viewed as a disc, commonly referred to as a ‘little planet’ and prefigured as a format in the 1850s by the photographer Eugène Viollet-Le-Duc. Of most interest to me was a lunar perspective, in which the folded sphere is viewed from the outside. This is something entirely different to little planet discs. The lunar perspective turns the photosphere into an object, into a panoramic orb.

Proceeding from this point onwards, I applied to the photosphere the same logarithm in Cinema 4D, translating the light contrasts into depth. This gave an entirely different form when rendered: the skeleton of a tarpaper shack, with its clear lines intersecting rocky foregrounds. [fig. 33] An abandoned train tunnel as an elliptical form. [fig. 34] A roundabout with a public sculpture featuring five rusty palm trees becomes entirely abstract, except for the palm trees. [fig. 35] All these places photographed held special meaning and memories connected to my family history, but they were also intended to influence the eventual shape of the sphere’s relief. The beams of the tarpaper shack drew strong lines in the eventual object. The train tunnel became a dark, covered space with bright light at both ends. The roundabout’s palm trees translated beautifully, carved deeply and clearly into the object, while the circular form of the roundabout corresponded perfectly with the circles of the sphere.

The next step was printing these image files into objects. I printed an example in plastic, 20 cm in diameter, with a high-end 3D printer. It was based on a photograph of a forest, with a vantage point located between the trees. [fig. 36] The panoramic photograph of the dense forest became an object shaped like a star, the treetops turned into a wild landscape of spikes. [fig. 37] It was, however, so detailed and fragile, that a cast in bronze proved impossible. And plastic as an end result was not desirable, for the same reason as Photographer was cast in bronze — to emphasise its sculptural nature and to give the object both a physical and psychological weight in its perception.

Therefore, I experimented with printing these spheres in titanium. Titanium printers are the most precise printers available and are able to build up complex self-supporting forms. The natural appearance of the printable alloy provided the necessary strength and weight. The original panorama photograph contained a landscape with a road and a flat field with overhanging trees on one side; on the other side was a clearly identifiable tree on the distant horizon. It was an interesting panorama, since it offered such a heterogeneous composition of different landscapes in one image. [fig. 38] When it became an object, it rendered the photographed landscape nearly unrecognizable. Fluffy clouds became mountain ridges on a sea of sky, the horizon an abyss, the nearby forest an almost unprintable frenzy of deep lines. A rare identifiable feature in this experiment was a naked poplar tree from the foreground. The result, 51°00'15.4"N x 5°24'01.3"E, was a photograph that has been converted from two to three dimensions. It is a 360 x 180-degree panoramic photograph of a landscape that has been translated into depth. The landscape is seemingly carved into the surface, varying in depth according to their brightness in the original image. This image-as-sculptural-form, which gleans its title from the photograph’s geographic coordinates, carries the idea of photo-sculptures to an extreme conclusion. Once translated and materialised, these titanium orbs looked like little stars. Like a sun shaped by its own light. The outcome is a solidified photograph of landscape and memory. [fig. 39]