America By The Yard: Cirkut Camera Images
MacKay, Robert B.
£42.00
America By The Yard: Cirkut Camera Images From The Early Twentieth Century
By Robert B. MacKay
Published by W.W. Norton & Co, New York, 2006. First edition.
Approx size: 27.5cm H x 40.5cm W (10.75" H x 16"W). Hardback with dust jacket. Photography. 216pp.
"This book is both a history of an unusual camera and a splendid display of its product. The Cirkut Camera, Eastman Kodak's rotational device for taking panoramic pictures - or "yard-longs" - took the nation by storm in the 1910s and '20s, and was widely used by commercial photographers through the World War II era. Cirkut camera photographs were contact printed from very long negatives, few of which survive. In this astonishing collection of early panoramas, many up to 5 feet wide, 102 "yard-longs" are meticulously reproduced in duotone to display the extraordinary detail of these very large prints.
Breaking photography out of its limited 50-degree field of vision, the Cirkut ushered in a new way of viewing America, in cinematic perspective, from the commonplace to the sublime. Cirkut cameras were used to record scenic vistas, epic events, and group photos of conventioneers, workers, soldiers and students. Here with many foldouts that show the prints in their full glory, are such historic moments as the building of the Panama Canal, the sunken battleship Maine in Havana Harbour, the crash of the dirigible Shenandoah, the 50th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg, the 1908 Wellesley graduating class and a very early race at the Indianapolis speedway. More mundane subjects - a bathing beauty contest, locomotive factory workers - are equally fascinating in this format."
Book condition: Brand new