The Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago paused for a brief moment on Tuesday (20 August) for an Iranian photographer to take a long exposure on a 100-year-old panoramic camera.
Abbas Shirmohammadi, an Iranian photographer who has used the camera to shoot a number of DNCs aswell as the last six presidential inaugurations, used it to take a 360-degree photo of the convention crowd on the second night of proceedings.
The catch? The camera, which was mounted on a large tripod in the middle of the auditorium, needed 22 seconds to complete the exposure.
Associated Press (AP) reporter Farnous Amiri tweeted Shirmohammadi saying: “Please do not move,” he tells a laughing audience. “I congratulate all of you. Thank you for your patience.”
(You can see Shirmohammadi urging the crowd to stand still in this video from the AP.)
Jezebel editor Lauren Tousignont wrote: “Shirmohammadi – who was standing on a raised platform in the middle of the arena – managed to spot one woman who was…not standing still…and sternly asked her to ‘please put your hands down, ma’am.’ This was the moment I started to hold my breath, out of fear of persecution.”
Shirmohammadi runs the photography business Panoramic Visions, which started in 1985. Apart from his political photographs, the Baltimore-based photographer also shot a panoramic of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The panoramic image taken on Shirmohammadi’s veteran camera was in stark contrast to another analogue moment during the second day: Ella Emhoff, the stepdaughter of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris snapped the convention on a disposable Kodak camera.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
[…] [Show slideshow] plus I saw this great video on youtube about film aspect ratios. And Phillip Johnson told us about just WHY the audience at the 2024 DNC had to stand still for 22 seconds. […]