Special exhibition «Alpine Panoramas. Highlights of Swiss Photography» - 2009
Nidwaldner Museum, Stans
Excerpt from a press release, April 2009:
A quiet click and the picture is taken. This is how photographs are taken nowadays, with ultramodern digital technology doing the rest. The special exhibition “Alpine Panoramas. Highlights of Swiss Photography” illustrates the cultural, historical and technical development of panoramic photography.
n 1845 Friederich von Martens succeeded in making the leap from panoramic painting to panoramic photography with his Megaskop camera. However, popularisation first took off with flexible film when Eastman Kodak introduced his first panoramic camera, with a viewing angle of 112 degrees, at the 1900 World Fair in Paris. The highlights of the exhibition include the work of the pioneer Adolphe Braun (1812–1877), who captured our mountain landscapes with a 130 degree angle Johnson’s rotation camera. Or the photographs by Emil Ganz (1879–1962) and Emil Schulthess (1913–1996).
At the heart of today’s panoramic photography there are two photographers, who couldn’t be more different from each other. The Nidwaldner, Willi P. Burkhardt, 86 years old, is a pioneer of helicopter photography. He developed a hanging system, together with his sons, which is designed especially for panoramic photography and which can be lowered during flight. From the helicopter, this technology allows him to shoot angles of the beautiful mountains that have never been seen before. The second is the Valais photographer and computer scientist, Matthias Taugwalder. The 28 year old descendent of the Taugwalder mountaineer dynasty climbs to the summit by foot with a mountain guide and captures the high-alpine motifs with his digital camera. His high-resolution gigapixel photos can be admired in an 8 metre wide rotunda.
The exhibition was conceived by the Swiss National Museum. The Nidwaldner Museum has adopted the idea and developed an additional Nidwaldner-specific section.
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