Why is it called a view camera?

[Harold_4074]

Getting back to the original question, my personal WAG is that the term "view camera" came into use when cameras began to be built expressly in forms which allowed them to be taken outdoors for the making of "views". Their predecessors were what we now call "studio" cameras (the huge, floor-mounted beasts with built-in stands) but 'way back when they were probably just called...cameras. Other variants---"detective", "miniature" and "folding" cameras---came along later.

I base this suspicion mainly on the memory of old photographs, and collections, titled "View of <location>" or "Some Views of <exotic location>" .

Anyone?

[John Kasaian]

On July 29, 1882 Vittorio Sella made a panoramic mosaic of 13 30x40cm glass plates from the summit of the Matterhorn. After portaging the camera, tripod, 13 glass plates and Dallmeyer lens up to the top, a member of a Swiss Army expedition (testing out a newly designed pocket knife) who summited at about the time Vittorio was setting up his camera inquired if the camera was in fact, a Hasselblad (at that time Hasselblad was engaged in making trendy heliograph devices, and the climber suspected Sella might be engaged in some sort of espionage, since Cervinia is on the border between Switzerland and Italy where a lucrative trade in black market goat bells exists to this day) Vittorio, gasping for air after all that physical activity replied in a thick italian accent: "No, Its a (whew!) camera. " The Climber mistook (whew!) for "view" and in the following years during the popularity of 12x20 banquet cameras, the (whew)/view nomenclature was indelibly associated with what we now commonly call view cameras.

Cheers!