In class last month we were studying some of the history of painting that could be relevant to our photography and looking at the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, I learned about the world landscape style, in which an imaginary panoramic landscape is seen from an elevated viewpoint. The horizon is high in the picture, giving the viewer a bird’s eye view of the scene. The physical canvas is large, and the characters are small. Bruegel deploys this in The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, among others. The high viewpoint and the mass of small figures show strong compositional similarities to Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, for example. So I started taking some pictures from a higher viewpoint, looking down at a panorama that might be a back plate for such a scene (click the images below to see them larger).
