Posts Tagged ‘earth’
22
May
2009
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.
15
May
2009
Life, Visually Dissected
An owl, a worm and a lizard walk into a bar…
The glorious thing about natural habitats is that one organism can house millions of others. And we often seem to forget that — when we stroll by a tree in the park, the only “organism” we’re likely to see in it is an 8-year-old scrambling for the next branch up.
But a recent campaign for WWF (that’s the World Wildlife Fund, not the World Wrestling Federation, ahem) visually dissected the fascinating microcosm of life that exists inside (and on, and under, and around) some of those our flora and fauna stand-bys.
Of course, if you’ve been paying attention lately, the complexity of life inside a coral reef won’t surprise you. But it’s still a stride-stopping reminder of just how much we can lose by doing so little to preserve it.
Not unlike Chris Jordan’s work, the campaign borrows from the revelational capacity of data visualization to inspire deeper environmental awareness through an emotional understanding of an issue that would remain abstract and irrelevant if presented as dry statistics — a visceral bridge between left brain and right brain.
Out of DDB Brazil.
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