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Color cirkut photograph
Oscar Bailey’s long, narrow photographs were made with a Cirkut camera, a device invented in 1915 to photograph vast panoramas and great groups of people. The camera rotates a full circle, and therefore photographs a little more than 350 degrees. The color negatives were contact-printed on Kodak Ektacolor 78F surface paper.
Bailey has said, “if you would set the photograph on edge and pull the two ends around until the buildings on each end (the same buildings) line up, you could see how the world actually looked. But when you lay it out flat, then you get the distortion.” Bailey has used this distortion to create visual poetry in his Graphicstudio work Asheville, North Carolina.
