About that strange camera...

The contraption behind all those Vermont panoramas.

That's a Cirkut camera at work, photographed in 1916 at the University of Toronto. The military unit is posing; the photographer is up on the raised platform, mid-arc. It's the kind of camera that took this week's White River Junction panorama. The halo is an artifact from the original scanning. The original print had no halo.

The Cirkut was a cabinet-sized box, manufactured by Folmer and Schwing (a division of Eastman Kodak) and first patented in 1904. A clockwork motor rotated the whole camera on its tripod. A slit at the back of the lens housing exposed a vertical column of film at a time, while a reel of long, paper-backed film fed past the slit, synchronized with the rotation. One squeeze of the bulb committed you to the entire sweep. You could not stop mid-arc.

The film came out in inches, not millimeters. Five, six and a half, eight, ten, even sixteen inches wide. Barreuther’s Vermont prints are mostly 6.5 by 35 inches. The Library of Congress holds a 1906 Cirkut of Washington that runs twenty feet.

The format had quirks. A person who moved during the sweep smeared. The classic trick was for the assistant to walk along behind the rotation, so they appeared at both ends of a group portrait. And if the sun was on one side of the arc, that side blew out the exposure. The Cirkut did not edit. It recorded the long, awkward, beautiful truth of what it saw.

For the full rabbit hole: Cirkut on Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirkut_(camera)), and the enthusiast site at cirkut.org.

Cameron Cross

for the

Norwich Historical Society