From the Archive (Sept 3, 1994): This is BIG: Barr captures Mobile’s panorama in world’s largest photo

By Kathy Jumper, Living Editor

Perched on the edge of the pilot house, six flights above the ship's main deck, Paula Barr had Mobile's waterfront at her feet. She snapped the picture and prayed the sun wouldn't set. A sweaty 45 minutes later her 360 degree panoramic camera stopped. Her heart leapt. The photo she had chased two years was hers. "It had to be art," she said. "It had to be magical and sing. I did not want just another documentation."

In January, her work of art, ''Twilight Interlude," will debut at the Mobile Infirmary Medical Center's new atrium. It's the world's largest photograph, measuring 12 feet high and 72 feet long. The photo will be produced on glass tiles and spans an entire wall at the Infirmary's atrium waiting area. The atrium is the final phase of an expansion project which joins all of the hospital's outpatient services. It will serve as a waiting area for patients and family and includes a Food Court For the Infirmary, the mural is viewed as a gift to the public. Chandler Bramlett, CEO of Infirmary Health System, has worked with Ms. Barr from the start. She pitched the idea of a photo and he offered a bigger challenge--the mural. He's pleased with the results. "It's our sincere desire that the mural provide an environment that promotes healing and has a positive impact on everyone that passes through the atrium," he said.

For Ms. Barr, who was raised in Mobile and lives in New York, the photograph is a gift in honor of her daughter Lauren, who died a couple of months after birth from heart problems. It's for Lauren, who died a decade ago, and other people who have lost "angels" that she brought her art to a hometown hospital, she said. After spending endless hours, days and weeks in sterile hospital waiting rooms worrying about her daughter, she relived those days when her late father, Milton Briskman, was hospitalized at the Infirmary a couple of years ago. "I had spent three days with my head in an ashtray while sitting in the waiting room at the Infirmary," she recalled. That's when the photo idea came to mind. "With this panoramic photo mural I envisioned something so majestic and serene that the viewer could spend those horrific and unending hours exploring its detail and literally losing themselves in it."

The scope of the project was as awesome as the huge wall the mural will cover. For months she hopped aboard tugboats, studied weather maps, traipsed the rooftops of skyscrapers, and dangled from monster cranes on Mobile River. She photographed 11 locations around the city, and admits, "they almost lost me," on her first shoot -- a 105-degree, breezeless August afternoon at Bellingrath Gardens. Indeed, it was the tranquil Bellingrath photo (even Callaway Gardens sent butterflies to release for the shoot) that was a close runner, up to the waterfront photo. But Bramlett argued for the port.

"He wanted the heart and pulse of the city and wanted progress to be the message of the city," she said. "So it was back to the drawing board." While preparing to board another of Chipco's cranes last October, she stumbled upon the Yucatan, a French-owned vessel bound for Europe that had docked at Berth 2 at the Alabama State Docks. "It was 3 p.m, and like a mirage," Ms. Barr said, relishing in the ship's size and perfect view. She tracked down the ship's broker to get permission to go aboard. Ironically, when she went back the next day to take more pictures, the ship had left the port. "Had it really been there?" she asked, laughing. "It really was like a mirage."

And before she had a chance to see the waterfront photos, the lab she had rushed her film to in New York, was calling her with rave reviews. "Awesome," is what her colleagues dubbed the shots. High praise for an established painter who didn't take her first photograph until the late '70s during a visit to Mobile. She and her husband, Jack Krueger, a sculptor, were driving to Dauphin Island and she stopped to take a photo of the red dirt--the result was a brilliant red image that she still cherishes. Like her paintings, the photos she takes express action and are large, almost life-size. "I've always wanted my photographs to have the same experience as a painting. And I've always wanted to get movement in a still photograph."

Her paintings have been exhibited at renowned museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has worked with corporate clients for 15 years. Including Minolta, M&M Mars, New York Times Magazine, Chase Manhattan Bank, Bellevue Hospital, New York Life Insurance and New York Telephone. Her next-assignment is for another regular client, Life Magazine. She has also released numerous award-winning posters including prints of the Brooklyn Bridge and George Washington Bridge. The Infirmary project has earned the distinction of being listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest photograph in the world. The hospital will do the project justice by making a documentary on it, as well as produce a commemorative poster and book In January.

While Ms. Barr and her husband reside In New York with their nine-year-old son, August, it's Mobile she calls home. "Every time I come to Mobile and step off the plane, I feel at peace, I feel like I've come home."

“For months she hopped aboard tugboats, studied weather maps, traipsed the rooftops of skyscrapers, and dangled from monster cranes on Mobile River. She photographed 11 locations around the city, and admits, ‘they almost lost me,’ on her first shoot -- a 105-degree, breezeless August afternoon at Bellingrath Gardens.”