Photographer Cameron R Neilson, who we introduced in our earlier post about Oslo’s ripening real estate market, has produced some fantastic views from within Oslo. As part of the Straight Up project, Neilson is challenging both the way in which city-scapes and skylines are photographed and the way that our eyes navigate the urban environment.
Check out the remarkable photographs after the break.
The Straight Up project is part of a discovery into the redefinition of the city skyline. ” Though certainly iconic,” Neilson writes of his work, “this very narrow viewpoint doesn’t fully resonate the ebb and flow of daily city life.” So with the camera level and pointed straight up, Neilson produces images that are often a lost memory of the city. The skyline is explored in a way that resonates the experience of the person on the ground, meandering between buildings, peaking through their towering walls at the sky above even when our eyes don’t generally navigate the city in this way.
The way Neilson explains it:
The repetitive patterns are fairly characteristic to each city and taken as a whole, create a unique spatial fingerprint. The resulting photographs bring back a sense of youthful discovery–the feeling of lying in the grass and looking to the sky–finding shapes in clouds, trees, or in this case between buildings and their surroundings. The abstract point of view is a challenge at times–particularly in a world where we often look straight ahead, or mostly down.
It is a remarkable perspective, to see the buildings we associate with the urban environment flipped on their axis. There is a refreshing uniqueness hiding within each city, check out Oslo’s.
Straight Up is an ongoing project which has covered twenty-four cities in thirteen countries. Check out Cameron’s progress here.
