Culture
Imagining Streets as Their Own Little Worlds
The photographer Michael James Murray swirls pictures of blocks and landmarks into sphere-shaped panoramas.
As a kid, Michael James Murray loved going to the planetarium near his home in Rochester, New York, to glimpse a hint of far-off worlds. Now, there’s a trace of the extraterrestrial in the photographer’s series of spherical panoramas that swirl an entire landscape into a self-contained globe.
Murray knits together up to 40 frames to create a composite portrait of the landscape around a central point. He sets up his tripod six feet off the ground, and shoots for up to 45 minutes. By collating and compressing so many elements—like buildings, sidewalks, and fountains—he says, the images become a sort of “photographic Rorschach test,” inviting viewers to tumble in and cut their own paths through.