Olivo Barbieri

I've been meaning to write about Olivo Barbieri's unique photography for a long time now. I was introduced to his work through a blog named Roadside Scholar and was instantly enchanted. I love photography in general but Olivo uses a unique trick to create what look like miniature scenes. And who doesn't love miniatures?

Don't be confused though. The image above is an aerial photograph of the actual Paris hotel in Las Vegas. Barbieri uses a technique called Tilt-Shift to create the illusion of smallness. He blurs the edges of the photographs to give the image a sense of the unreal. We look at the images and see scale models when they were actually taken of real-life objects.

Olivo has normally worked from city to city creating a site-specific series of images. His photos from Las Vegas were the first that I'd seen and they were so unreal that for a while I simply could not believe that he hadn't built a scale model and photographed it. I include images from Vegas, Rome (The Coliseum), and New York. I'm so in awe of this man's work. The ability to create unreal images from real landmarks is so incredible to me that it seems like magic rather than incredibly technical photography. I understand that Olivo has done some videos using the same technique. I'll see about find them and posting them. In the meantime, enjoy more of Olivo's work at a good article by Metropolis Mag and at ArtNet.