PANORAMA DIARY is a long-term documentary panoramic photo series by Jarek Januszewski, exploring the intersection of photography, geography, and visual narrative. Conceived as a long-duration visual archive, the project gradually constructs a personal cartography of lived, visited, and documented places.
Throughout life, we traverse variety of those. Eeither familiar or entirely new geographic spaces that occasionally become our own territories. PANORAMA DIARY represents an effort to document personal spaces and territories through the medium of panoramic photographic landscapes.
Geopoetics and photography
This documentation extends beyond the artistic realm (as mere landscape or staffage), encompassing a geographical dimension as well — capturing both the natural and anthropogenic features of specific areas. It is an experience of space; a practice situated at the intersection of geography and poetics, or what may be referred to as geopoetics.
Geopoetics may be understood as a claim to interpret various spatial phenomena, considering space as an inseparable component of artistic experience and practice […]* As a research orientation, it inquires into the ways in which space influences culture, and conversely, how cultural phenomena shape our perception of space. Although the term traditionally pertains to a specific field of literary studies, it aptly encapsulates the essence of this series — and is invoked here deliberately.
From this perspective, the PANORAMA DIARY may be construed as a form of spatial documentation with potential transdisciplinary value. Although not all images are context-specific, the majority of scenes are embedded within clearly identifiable spatial reference. Each panorama is geolocated, thereby functioning as an in situ visual record — anchored in time and space and available for future reference.
Another central aim of the project is the preservation of memory — those moments that inevitably fade over time. This is especially pertinent in the case of emotionally charged, “cinematic” recollections. A substantial portion of the visual material features members of my family and close friends; their inclusion reflects a deliberate effort to retain and archive personal histories within a spatial context.
The sense of visual continuity is reinforced not only by the use of a cinematic aspect ratio (2.40:1) in each image, but also through the standardized formal structure applied across the entire series. In this way, PANORAMA DIARY may be interpreted as an experimental visual narrative — a static yet dynamic form that evokes the language of cinema.
The technique
All images were captured using various generations of the iPhone, taken as sequential photographs and subsequently stitched together in post-production. None of the panoramas presented here were created using the iPhone’s native panorama mode, which was intentionally avoided due to its tendency to produce inconsistent results — particularly in scenes involving motion.
While image quality is of great importance throughout the project, it is worth noting that all photographs were taken with an smartphone camera device, and minor visual artifacts may occure occasionally.