Mapping the World-as-Exhibition: Expressive Typography in Immersive Media

The popular nineteenth-century attractions known as panoramas, which offered transporting virtual experiences of distant places and times, were typically accompanied by interpretive printed ephemera including visitor guidebooks and diagrammatic “panorama keys” drawn in stereographic perspective. Panorama keys did more than label the view; they also served as transporting devices in their own right. Representational conventions employed in panoramas and their keys describe a visual and material culture of seeing, sensing, and imagining a changing world during the period of British colonial expansion. Transporting graphic strategies were also used in printed media not directly affiliated with panoramas, including maps and bird’s-eye views. This article describes the immersive features of panorama keys and compares them with features of contemporaneous Arctic maps in order to demonstrate the pervasiveness of panoramic representational strategies. In particular, we examine the role of perspectival and expressive typography in the immersive articulation of the picture plane in keys and maps. This analysis elucidates the viability of typography as an object for studying the subjectivity inhering in images whose power derives from their explicit assertion of objectivity.