This panoramic photo was taken while visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in February. In Parisian Views, we learned about visual culture as it developed throughout nineteenth-century Paris. We saw how Parisian artists came up with the idea of a moving painting, a painting in which you could be submerged emotionally and visually, known as the panorama. You would be able to see different moments of the same day in a single painting just by playing with lights in the back. People would thus be able to travel the world without having to leave their town. It was a step closer to what we have today with Snapchat or Instagram. The idea of incorporating a panorama option into our cameras nowadays enables us to share a moment in time, but instead of being a single image, it’s a 180° picture. You are drawn to this kind of photo because it makes you feel like you are in it, your eyes are linked to the camera, and you start to imagine yourself in that place. In this case, looking at the photo I took in February, I can hear the steps of hundreds of people walking in those huge galleries, groups from different countries listening to their guide. If you look closely enough, you can even distinguish the texture of the paint on those paintings.

“What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough,” the French painter Eugène Delacroix once said. The same goes for this class: you don’t need to look too far to see beauty. Rather, it exists in everything we see every day; you just need to open your eyes and to be amazed by your surroundings.