Constantinople, Panorama

In the nineteenth century, photographic panoramas were commercially marketed luxury items, created to celebrate cities. In 1857 James Robertson and Felice Beato carried their heavy wooden camera, tripod, fragile glass plates, and chemicals to the top of the Beyazit Tower in Constantinople (now Istanbul). The fifty-metre fire tower provided an ideal vantage point from which to survey the city, with its dense accumulation of buildings, markets, and streets. The photographers divided the view into five sections, producing multiple negatives of each before moving the camera, all the while maintaining a continuous horizon line. Once developed, the individual prints were carefully trimmed, aligned, and mounted onto a single sheet of paper.