“The City as an Avatar of Itself”
“Neighbourhoods” by Hamish Grant
My first exposure to tilt-shift photography was in 2004, when I visited Olivo Barbieri’s Site Specific: Montreal exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Commissioned to compliment the CCA’s great show on Montreal in the 60s, Barbieri used a tilt-shift lens to photograph major 1960s-era Montreal landmarks from the air: the Maison Radio-Canada, Westmount Square, Place Ville-Marie, Place des Arts, the Metropolitan expressway and La Ronde, among others. The result was a series of images that transformed Montreal into something as pristine and perfect as a scale model.
Such is the effect produced by a tilt-shift lens, which fools the eye into thinking it is looking at something much smaller than it really is. When used to document urban landscapes, the city becomes, in Barbieri’s words, “an avatar of itself.” Last year, he explained his mission to Metropolis: “I was a little bit tired of the idea of photography allowing you to see everything. After 9/11 the world had become a little bit blurred because things that seemed impossible happened. My desire was to look at the city again.” So far, Barbieri has shot Rome, Amman, Las Vegas and Shanghai.
Recently, tilt-shift photography—both the authentic kind and Photoshop imitations—has become popular on photo-sharing sites such as Flickr. When it’s done well, it achieves a similar surreal quality to Barbieri’s work, transforming the hard-edged reality of aerial views into something softer and more ambiguous.
“Spadina Bridge” by Hamish Grant
“Queen and Spadina” by Hamish Grant
Tags: Photography
Christopher Szabla says:
macro photography achieves the same effects, which always makes me want to believe shots like these are of models (which has more often given me the sense that we’re looking, through them, at a sort of idealized world, rather than a traumatically distorted one). barbieri’s analogy would go a lot further if they were specifically showing us what we were blind to, rather than bending the world into a sort of vague delirium that could be a commentary on…any mind-altering process.
February 3rd, 2007 at 9:15 pm
Beth says:
Very interesting post, Chris. I wish I’d seen that exhibition and was glad for the link to the photos – I didn’t know anything about tilt-shift photography before reading this.
February 3rd, 2007 at 10:54 pm
The Angry Geographer says:
I’d love to see this used on a city like LA or Phoenix. Talk about Baudrillardian hyperreality…
February 4th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
bianca says:
Very beautiful work!
I usualy dont particularly enjoy macro photography, which apparently became in focus, since the the venice bienal of 2003. But this is a very interesting effect, I would say it is more a hipnoreality.
February 5th, 2007 at 3:12 pm