Photography is conventionally understood as an art of surfaces. Here I am speaking of photographic objects, as well as their content, which are the product of light reflecting off surfaces and mechanically, chemically or digitally leaving its trace. The cut involved in this process — a surgical incision into time and place — is demarcated by the edges of the print, while the seamless surface in between is what we call the photographic image. Thaddeus Holownia certainly understands the medium that way; he has spent a lifetime making images with a particularly challenging instrument, the panoramic camera whose sweep from edge to edge creates a particular kind of photographic experience.
