This is the first of two
panoramas of San Francisco photographed by English-born landscape photographer,
Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge arrived in San Francisco from Europe in 1855; he
made his first panorama of the city in January 1877. Muybridge’s panorama was
available in two formats: as a set of albumen photographs mounted on cabinet
cards and as an album of 11 albumen photographs. This series of 11 photographs
assembled into a seamless panorama shows a 360-degree view of the city. The
long exposure time accurately captured buildings and ships in the bay, but not
the people moving below on the street. Muybridge’s analytic and systematic
vision was already taking form in these large-scale panoramas, an approach he
pursued as his career developed.