C I R C U M S P E C T 2017

all around really long photographs by Michael Weil

Spinning, front behind and back to fore, I turned to cell-phone panoramic photo-stitching technology to render my new imbalance. “Move-slowly,” the screen implored, so I sped up. I whirled in place and became transfixed by the purposeful accidents called “discontinuities”—a digital camera’s counter attack on a user’s non-compliance. These are the sutures, fissures, blurs, and digital remnants that result from pushing the camera’s processor beyond its ability (its desire?) to “accurately” capture numerous individual images and stitch them together into a seamless, continuous-horizon-line panoramic. I provoked the cell-phone camera and embraced its response.

First in Wenceslas Square—site of a much bigger revolution than my technological disobedience—and at the Powder Tower, around Prague, 900 degrees, I started on these circumspect panoramic views. These images (well most but the vertical ones) encompass at least 360-degrees, laying out flat a visual impossibility of the world all at once behind and in front of us. From Prague to Iceland, Eleuthera to New Orleans, Cleveland to Utah, Manhattan to Austria, I spent a wary two years circumscribing vision, learning to work with the phone-camera’s impressive capabilities and limitations to create and suppress discontinuities all around me.