Kenneth Snelson

Kenneth Snelson is renowned as both a sculptor and a photographer, and his work has been exhibited in major museums and galleries across the United Sates, Europe, and Japan. His lighter-than-air sculptures made of aluminum and wire defied our belief in gravity, and his 360-degree panoramic photographs similarly present views that are impossible for the human eye to comprehend at a single glance.

Snelson's concern with the geometry of structures is immediately apparent in his panoramic photographs. Vast empty space or soaring vistas are anchored by buildings, bridge scans, gardens, or skylines. Snelson translates these great sweeps of space into a contained photographic form using a cirkut camera, a device that records a 360-degree view. The fact that the beginning and end of a flattened 360-degree view are the same point adds another confounding dimension to the picture, yet the visual elements of these photographs, like the structural elements of his sculptures, hold together in a balanced and precise fashion.