Panoramic Visions: Sven Hedin in “Transhimalaya” 1906–1909

This chapter studies the panoramic visions created by Swedish geographer Sven Hedin on a journey to Tibet between 1906 and 1909. It reads Hedin’s geographic images and texts through a broader nineteenth-century history of the panorama and indicates how his panoramic visions were part of a broader media culture of the century. Furthermore, the chapter claims that Hedin’s geographic images and texts contributed to the shaping of a modern regime of vision where the world in overview was a desirable object. Using intermediality as a method, I display how these visions emerged through a network of media formats, including photographs, hand-drawn panoramas, water-colour sketches, and texts. The article argues that these formats were combined through “descriptive layering.” They shared the panorama as a motif, yet they were also layered in a material sense: attached to, and interlaced with, each other. I argue that descriptive layering was a way of handling the vexed relationship between overview and detail, and it allowed the panoramic representations to move between knowledge-based and aesthetic experiences.