Masumi Hayashi made panoramas by cutting photographs apart and suturing them back together in grids, leaving the joins visible. The horizon rarely runs straight. A single view may fold several vantage points into one plane, so that a site is described not from a settled position but from many at once. Panoramic Photo Collages 1976–2006, published by Radius Books, presents this work across 168 pages and 62 images, with an essay by Barbara Tannenbaum. Hayashi (1945–2006) is the photographer throughout; the book surveys the panoramic collages she made between 1976 and 2006.
Her subjects are specific and difficult: Rust Belt landscapes, EPA Superfund sites, the World War II Japanese American internment camps, and decaying prisons. These are places where damage has entered the ground, the water, the architecture, and the historical record. Hayashi uses a format ordinarily tied to tourism, the continuous sweep that makes a prospect look whole, and turns it toward what that prospect conceals. Because her views extend past 360 degrees and her seams cut openly across the scene, the panorama becomes a way of registering how social ills are expressed in space rather than a way of admiring it.
The book’s value as an object lies in how directly it serves that argument. The hardcover measures 15 by 9.25 inches, a proportion that lets the grid structure read at something like its intended scale: the repeated cells, the mismatched exposures, the abrupt transitions between panels. Tannenbaum’s essay provides the art-historical context the images invite, situating Hayashi’s splicing within the histories of photomontage and panoramic photography. The 62 plates constitute a substantial gathering of a body of work whose method is inseparable from its meaning.
For a collection attentive to postwar American photography, landscape, and documentary practice, the volume offers the clearest access to a photographer who treated the panorama as an instrument of scrutiny. Its interest is not merely thematic. Hayashi’s grids demonstrate how a photographic form can be rebuilt from the inside, and how the resulting picture can hold contradiction in place instead of resolving it.
