The first step to taking a halfway decent photograph is making sure you're holding the camera right-side-up ... unless you’re Arnau Rovira Vidal. The Spanish photographer creates the stunning architectural images in his series Re-Form by turning his camera upside down.
Vidal stumbled on the idea two years ago while on vacation in Lisbon. He was experimenting with his Lomo LC-A camera, taking double exposures by pressing the shutter twice without advancing the film. The results were mostly chaotic until, while shooting a kitschy pink mall, he flipped his camera for the second shot. It produced a surprisingly beautiful geometric form, the building's architecture perfectly mirrored onto itself. Vidal knew he had to make more.
“It was the beginning of something,” he says, “the beginning of trying to control something you can’t control.”
Over the next two years, he shot roughly 700 double exposures of shiny office towers, residential high-rises, and other buildings. He scouted them while driving around or virtually wandering on Google Street View through cities like London, Mexico City, and Barcelona, where he lives. He tried to steer the end result by always shooting from the same distance and angle, on cloudy days when the light was uniform, the sky forming just the right amount of negative space. But the final image always surprised him. “I could imagine what it could be like, but it was never exactly how I imagined,” he says.
The images are, nonetheless, mesmerizing. “You don’t know where one building starts and ends,” he says. Or which way is up or down.
