shashasha

Europe in the 1970s, photographed in panoramic proportions

When Japanese photography legend Chotoku Tanaka visited Europe in the 1970s, he acquired a “Horizont”, a panoramic camera made in the Soviet Union, in East Berlin and used it during the rest of his long trip that took him to Paris, West and East Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Vienna, Venice, Amsterdam, Prague and other cities. A brilliant street photographer, Tanaka’s photographs take on a strange new quality in the new format, and despite the pronounced everyday-ness and unaffectedness of his scenes, the realism of the photos is tinged with a hint of the surreal.

“It is not easy to analyze and explain the appeal of panoramic photographs. The one important thing about panoramic photography concerns photography’s artistic point of cutting out the real world: from the outset, panoramic photography does not care about camera angles and so forth.” ― from Chotoku Tanaka’s statement (translation by shashasha)