Panoramic Photography

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.