Moving Panoramas: The Paths as Image

Abstract

In the xix century, mobility became a central issue for societies. The expansion of new means of transportation such as the railway, as well as new visual productions centered around movement highlight this centrality. Whereas in the panoramas, quintessential nineteenth-century spectacle, the spectator was the one moving, physically walking around the image, moving panoramas switch the motion with the image moving before people’s eyes. This type of panorama exists in many respects between the panoramic view and cinematography, and is of special interest for describing certain changes upon spectators’ mobility. This type of visual mobility relates to spectators’ travelling longings, who desired from visual spectacles to feel transported. This way of travelling virtually through images, as well as other characteristics of such moving imagery like visual opulence or immediacy of visual consumption, came to be since then a fundamental component of the consumption of visual media.