Artist Spotlight: Stephan Zirwes Aerial Photography

Soccer field species, abstracting nature, and why you aren’t nearly as big as you think.

We’re aware we don’t go easy on superlatives here. But German photographer Stephan Zirwes is of the most deserving kind — words like incredible, phenomenal and fantastic are all but an understatement of his unlike-anything-else aerial magic.

One series, fields, explores the diverse “species” of soccer fields.

Leisure takes a look at the landscape of our free time.

Industry puts into perspective the vast scale of our man-made environment through geometric images that are aesthetically stunning, but somehow unsettling at the same time.

In construction, Zirwes takes a birds-eye look at the making of said man-made scale.

Leisure II presents a curious intersection of the above series — the unusual places people choose as oases of relaxation and recreation. If you look very closely at each image, you’ll find someone sprawling on a beach towel amidst the industrial clutter.

But perhaps our favorite series of his is titled snow — it abstracts nature with such simplicity and beauty that each image is more akin to a textured art canvas than a photograph.

There’s something incredibly humbling about seeing ourselves, from 10,000 feet, as the tiny figurines on a miniature set of life — a potent antidote to our grandeur-obsessed culture.

For the full Stephan Zirwes experience, we recommend fullscreen immersion.

via VSL

Related posts:

• Artist Spotlight: Chris Jordan What Van Gogh has to do with Big Tobacco and how piles of folded laundry put the prison system in perspective. The best of art is about something bigger than aestheticism, something that reflects on culture and makes a social statement that moves people. The work of artist Chris Jordan...
• Photography Spotlight: The Obama Phenomenon What a camera and a chalkboard have to do with the political and cultural heritage of our time. There’s no question the Obama campaign ignited some powerful human emotions. But it’s hard to grasp just how powerful by simply talking about them from the sidelines of abstraction. That’s why photographer...
• Perroquet: Photography, Science, Slow-Motion Beauty How three worlds of fascination collide through negative space and positive brilliance. ...
• Photography Spotlight: Things The cultural anthropology of things, or what Hitler's head has to do with Barbie....
• Artist Spotlight: Teddy Zareva How a photographer’s lens can break through the thickest of walls. Visual art, at its most powerful, charges a static image with a fluid and turbulent flow of thought and emotion. Photographer Teddy Zareva does just that in her work, sometimes aspirationally glamorous, often gritty and raw, and always rich...

This entry was posted on Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at 6:45 am in art, culture, photography and was tagged aerial, art, cool, earth, photography, world.