| Summary: | This thesis investigates the dynamics of spectatorship in the
panorama, a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree visual medium that Robert
Barker invented and patented in 1787. The study addresses the effects of the
first panorama representations on their urban audiences in Edinburgh and
London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Four chapters
of the thesis explore specific panorama exhibits: the View of Edinburgh and
the Adjacent Country from the Calton Hill (1788), the View of London from
the Roof of the Albion Mill (1791), the View of the Grand Fleet, Moored at
Spithead (1793) and two different panoramas of the View of Constantinople
(1801). As an overview and conclusion, the final chapter examines the
descriptive keys for the panorama views produced by Barker and his son
between 1793 and 1820. The approach the thesis takes involves examining
the tensions at work in the relations of exchange between the panorama as a
new visual medium and its urban viewers. At issue is the point of exchange
between the dictates of the panorama's visual form (that is, its subject matter
and the potential viewing positions established by its cylindrical format), and
the multiple usages and appropriations by its spectators. My thesis argues
that by transporting its spectators to other places in the city, country and
world beyond Britain's borders, the panorama created a spatial and temporal
disjunction between a 'here' and a 'there' that became a crucial locus for the
formation of new identities.
As I show, the viewing process could be differentiated through the use
of different types of spatial narratives. For example, there is evidence to
suggest that the panorama view of Edinburgh (1788) was used not merely to
identify and locate objects in three-dimensional space, but to bring a
historical narrative concerning the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion to life.
Furthermore, at least two modes of perception—one static and perspectival,
the other mobile and physiological—were encouraged by the panorama
vistas. The panorama's technology was complicated further by the production
of two different views of the same city, as in the case of the views of
Constantinople, which were exhibited in the upper and lower circles of
observation at the same time. This innovation allowed each view to cite the
other as evidence of its verisimilitude and 'truth,' a process that had the
potential to change the act of seeing into the act of believing.
The panoramas exhibited in Britain from 1788 to 1820 had a
tremendous effect on the ways in which their spectators saw themselves as
national subjects within an imperialist culture. In reconstructing a series of
politically charged physical realities by means of a sophisticated illusionism,
these images attempted to fix what it meant to be British. But, as the thesis
demonstrates, in different contexts and in different ways, the panoramas and
their keys also allowed space for the production of multiple and conflicting
identities. === Arts, Faculty of === Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of === 1 map === Graduate
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