If the selfie captures the spirit of the 21st century, a photo exhibit opening Saturday (Feb. 11) at the Library of Michigan steps back — way, way back — and takes a longer view.
“By the Yard: Michigan in Panoramic Photographs” gathers 50 spectacular images, many of them taken in Lansing, that delight the eye and challenge the neck.
The exhibit covers the heyday of the panoramic photo, a wildly popular format in the early 1900s, with outliers as old as 1864 or as recent as 2004.
There are ultra-wide landscapes and cityscapes, including a breathtaking view of Lansing’s skyline in 1912 and fascinating views of a train wreck, a dam under construction, the Detroit skyline and the ore docks of Marquette.
But most of these haunting images are best described as un-selfies — proud gatherings of dozens, or even hundreds, of people at employee picnics, union conventions, military parades, sports events, graduations and motorcycle rallies.
About half of the images come from the collection of Dan Barber, a retired United States Postal Service employee and local historian who lived in Lansing and died in 2020. Others come from a variety of private collectors.
The format reflects a growing, optimistic nation of joiners, a stark contrast to the my-face-in-your-face social media posts of today. Buffalo Bill (who visited Lansing in 1914 with his Wild West traveling show) is a big player in the exhibit, as are baseball great Ty Cobb and labor leader Walter Reuther, but the real stars are students, soldiers, milkmen, firefighters, fabric workers and other everyday people who were content to leave a tiny smudge on a yard-long photograph — or occasionally two smudges. A few sneaky subjects stood on one end of the crowd and waited for their photograph to be taken, then sprinted to the other end of the group, ahead of the motorized, rotating camera, thereby appearing twice in the same image.
A panoramic photo can teleport the viewer to another time and place like no other format.
Try to take your eyes off the proud army of milkmen, carts and horses from the Lansing Dairy in a panorama taken in 1922 in the middle of Cedar Street, near the 500 block, just north of Shiawassee Street.
Everywhere you look — straight ahead, to the left, to the right, even in the fuzzy field of your peripheral vision — the world is shouting “milk.”
“There’s always been a desire to capture the scope of the human eye in a photograph,” exhibit co-curator Jacob McCormick said. “They invented the cameras to do it in the early 1900s.”
People started taking panoramic photos almost immediately after the invention of photography by placing two or more daguerreotype plates alongside each other.
By 1900, there were two mass-produced swing-lens cameras (the Al-Vista and Kodak Panoram) that rotated to capture an image. A few years later, a camera called the Cirkut took the process to full rotation, like an owl scouting the forest for voles.
Some of the panoramas in the exhibit swivel 360 degrees to create a mind-bending visual Möbius strip. Lansing’s East Main Street warps and spirals toward the viewer in another milk-themed panorama depicting the Winans Dairy Co. crew in the 1920s.
“I had to make a diagram of this one,” McCormick said. “It’s hard to wrap your mind around.”
Starting with tripods 10 feet high, photographers climbed higher and higher to get the view they wanted. Before long, they were hoisting their heavy, $400 cameras onto telephone poles and water towers.
One panorama of Fort Custer, near Battle Creek, was taken with the aid of a set of kites 500 feet in the air.
According to McCormick, the kites were flown from boats in groups of three to five, with a camera suspended below and counterbalance rods to keep the camera from wobbling. A cable ran up the kite string so the photographer could open and close the shutter remotely.
These images shouldn’t be taken in at a glance. Linger awhile and you never know whom you might spot. A 1930s panorama of students and faculty at Olivet College first caught the eye of owner Bob Wilks more than 20 years ago, when he and his wife, Charlotte, were cruising Old Town art galleries.
Intrigued by the width of the photo, he climbed up a set of steps to scrutinize it more closely. He was amazed to find his next-door neighbor, Larida Petersen, and his high school band teacher, Sam Robinson (both now deceased), both of whom taught in the music department at Olivet nearly half a century before he spotted the photo.
Turning his gaze to the students, his heart jumped as he spotted the familiar, broad smile of his mother, Esther Andre Wilks.
Bob Wilks loaned the panorama to the Library of Michigan to include in the exhibit. The curators only learned about it Saturday (Feb. 4) but rushed to include it — not just for its own merits, but also because Wilks kept a full-size negative that helps demonstrate how panoramas were made.
The photo is full of oddities, as many panoramas are, including a man facing away from the camera and a woman holding a rabbit. The more you look, the more you see.
McCormick called the Library of Michigan exhibit “Dan Barber’s grand idea.”
It took decades for Barber, an avid local historian, to amass his impressive collection of panoramas.
Barber’s wife, Karla, is a co-curator of the exhibit.
“Dan was always a collector,” she said. “When I met him at 18, he was already collecting. We were married for 51 years, and he was always collecting something.”
Among Dan Barber’s passions were real photo postcards, a diminutive cousin to panoramic photos.
Unlike mass-market-printed postcards, real photo postcards are actual photographs printed on postcard stock. Although they began as a throwaway, ephemeral medium, they are now prized as a treasure trove of historical images from every nook and cranny of the nation, from big cities to the tiniest towns. When Kodak introduced the real photo service in 1907, and the U.S. Postal Service allowed messages to be written on the back, tens of thousands began to circulate throughout the country.
Many of the cards were snapshots by non-photographers.
A real photo postcard from about 1920, included in the exhibit, shows a photographer wading in a pond, tripod in hand, assembling a very large group on the shore, apparently for a panoramic photo.
The Barbers visited flea markets and antique shops around the state in search of historical nuggets. Dan Barber was intrigued whenever he spotted a wide-format photo, usually of Fort Custer in Battle Creek.
Many, if not most, of the surviving panoramas in Michigan are from Fort Custer, where civilian photographers made a lucrative income selling the images to soldiers and their families.
Dan Barber gradually accumulated more panoramas, some online and others from shops.
“He was fascinated by their size,” Karla Barber said.
Dan Barber and Historical Society of Greater Lansing President Bill Castanier, a co-curator of the exhibit and contributor to City Pulse, talked about displaying the panoramas as far back as 2018.
Dan Barber died in July 2020. The pandemic further scrambled any plans to exhibit the images.
Meanwhile, McCormick, a photo archivist and editor at the Michigan State Capitol, took an interest in the Barber collection.
An unwieldy, bizarre medium that compelled obsessive photographers to park tripods in ponds and hang cameras from kites started to suck him in too.
“There was a built-in market for some of these things, the conventions and bigger groups of people,” McCormick said. “But the landscapes — there’s less of a market. Who wants this giant thing you need an entire wall to hang it on? That’s why some of them are so scarce, and it’s so interesting to find them.”
He spent many hours looking for the names of early Lansing photographers and others who created the images, relying largely on Dave Tinder’s Directory of Early Michigan Photographers.
Tinder, a project engineer for Detroit automakers, amassed data on more than 8,000 Michigan photographers, along with a collection of 100,000 old photographs. His directory lists more than 130 Lansing photographers.
McCormick learned a lot about Michigan photographers while building on Tinder’s work. In Lansing, two photography shops — Russell Leavenworth (1919-1931) and Linn Photo Finishing Co. (1914-1921) were actively involved in taking panoramic photos.
“I found that they didn’t just take studio portraits,” McCormick said. “Some of them were out in the field doing these panoramas too, and that’s what’s really exciting — finding the variety of what they worked on.”
In 2021, McCormick and Castanier told Karla Barber they still wanted to mount the exhibit.
To expand its scope, they spread the word to local collectors and photo enthusiasts. One of the panoramas is a copy of an image owned and displayed by Eric Satterlee, owner of Meridian Winds.
They researched each image, wrote detailed background descriptions and set to work wrangling, framing and hanging the aggressively horizontal beasts.
“Now it’s happening,” Karla Barber said. “But it took a massive amount of work.”
In addition to his professional interest as a photo historian, McCormick has a personal stake in the exhibit.
His great-grandfather, Lansing labor leader Raymond W. Reed, is in two of the panoramas — bustling views of United Auto Workers conventions in Lansing from 1943 and 1944.
Reed worked at REO Motors for 43 years, served as a delegate for 20 national labor conventions and was president of the local REO Motors union for 20 years, its longest-serving leader.
A young Walter Reuther, later to become the longest-serving president of the United Auto Workers, is crouched in the foreground of the 1943 photo.
Reed was proud enough of his union activity to buy at least two panoramic photos. His daughter, McCormick’s great-aunt, saved the photos until she entrusted them to McCormick.
One of McCormick’s favorite images in the exhibit is a view of Lansing in 1912, taken by Frank Bovee, an optician who developed photos and did some commercial work. The occasion was Decoration Day (now Memorial Day), and the photo was taken from the top of the Downey Hotel, now Knapp’s Centre. The view looks north, with Washtenaw Street and the Capitol to the right.
“I see it as the most iconic panorama of Lansing,” McCormick said. “We believe it is a composite, pieced together from three or four images.”
Many of the exhibit’s panoramas resurrect forgotten corners of history. On May 10, 1921, a parade of dignitaries proceeded from downtown Lansing to a spot on South Pennsylvania Avenue, just north of the zoo, to dedicate a new baseball park for the Lansing Senators. The team disbanded within two years of its opening because of poor attendance. The large-scale park was dismantled and the infield sod ended up on another ball field, Sycamore Park, to be used by amateur city leagues.
Another dramatic panorama depicts the construction of Junction Dam near Manistee, now called Tippy Dam.
The log chute from the lumbering days is clearly visible in the photo.
The newest photo in the exhibit is a panoramic view of the Michigan House of Representatives’ 125th anniversary assembly in 2004, which marked more than a century since the first Legislature was held in the current Capitol. To get the image in one exposure, photographer Terry Farmer used a panoramic camera packed with 120mm film and climbed onto the rostrum of the biggest room in the Capitol, the House chamber. The chamber is seeded with several past and future mayors of cities across Michigan, future members of Congress and the future Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who was a state representative at the time.
One of the most evocative images in the exhibit is an extra-wide (74-inch), well-preserved, turn-of-the-20th-century panorama depicting the unincorporated lumber town of Johannesburg, east of Grayling. You can almost see the newborn town taking shape before your eyes on the right side of the panorama, next to a tiny Michigan Central Railroad depot and a quarter-mile-long wall of lumber milled at the Johannesburg Manufacturing Co. sawmill. The company store, built in 1901 and still standing, is clearly visible.
The town got its post office around the time the picture was taken. Once lumbering operations went into full swing, the town swelled to 700 people, but in this image, taken in 1901, there are more cows than humans.
The Barbers found the original panorama rolled up in the back of a box while doing research at the Archives of Michigan.
The Barbers and excited Archives staff carefully unrolled it and immediately took steps to preserve it.
“It’s one of the biggest ones I’ve ever seen,” McCormick said.
Nobody in Johannesburg even knows the photo exists yet, according to Karla Barber.
“I can’t wait to tell them about it,” she said with a grin.
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