Technology has always limited the kinds of photographs people can make. It was impossible, for example, to capture a fleeting gesture or a running horse before shutters and high-speed emulsions became commonplace in the 1870s. Panoramas also challenged photographers, until the introduction of the Cirkut camera in 1904.

The Cirkut camera was an ingenious device designed to capture panoramic views on single pieces of film. It didn’t revolutionize photography so much as it made a certain kind of photography easier. Before the Cirkut, photographers who wanted to encompass the panoramic sweep of a landscape had to rotate their cameras, make several exposures, and then join the separate images together. The Cirkut camera sidestepped all of that: it rested on a mechanism that rotated the camera through a horizontal arc of up to 360 degrees while gears rolled a sheet of film past a fixed slit.

The Cirkut camera was standard equipment for Colorado’s commercial and landscape photographers from 1904 to about 1945. They used Cirkuts for group portraits, mountain landscapes, and views of the built environment. This photo shows one third of a 1909 downtown Denver panorama that promoted construction bonds for an office block at Sixteenth and Court Streets that came down only two generations after it was built.

Cirkut camera photographs present unique problems to curators. Because prints ranged from five to sixteen inches high and up to sixty inches wide, many Cirkut print owners found that the easiest way to store their pictures was to roll them up. Over time, the gelatin emulsion of the printing paper "froze" in that tight coil. Combined with the brittleness that sets in as pulp paper ages, this condition makes it risky to view a rolled panorama without cracking or breaking it.

In 2003 and 2004, Society staff preserved 232 rolled photographs with support from a State Historical Fund grant. This project provided the means and opportunity to treat rolled prints in a specially built humidification chamber that relaxed the paper fibers and softened the gelatin emulsions so that the prints could be unrolled without damage. Staff then flattened the prints, following procedures and guidelines provided by Eileen Clancy, a Denver paper and photograph conservator. The flattened prints are accessible to researchers and photography aficionados in the Society’s Stephen H. Hart Library, where they may be viewed by appointment.