Panoramic Group Photos: The Selfies of the Early 20th Century

What is it about the group panoramic photo, the "widest of wide screens, a time-lapse that occurs in a single frame," that is, as Luc Sante writes, so "strange and compelling?" The view that the panorama provides, sometimes encompassing a full 360 degrees, is at once fact and fiction: you can’t possibly see that much at once, but look! There we are, every one of us, recorded for posterity. We were there, together.

The first panoramic photos made in the United States were chiefly city-scapes of places like Duluth, Nome, and San Francisco, created to attract developers with their big-view, one-shot wonder. But at the turn of the 20th century, with the introduction of flexible film, panoramic cameras with rotating tripods, and the popularization of the photo postcard, large gatherings of people became the major subject, "accounting for as much as 90 percent of the genre," notes Sante in the introduction to Josh Sapan’s new book, The Big Picture: America in Panorama, out this month.