Back to the list

PRESENTATION

He began the Site Specific project in Rome, before moving on to Amman, Jordan; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; and Shanghai, China. He achieves the distinctive look by photographing from a helicopter using a tilt-shift lens—a method, he says, that “allows me to choose what I really like in focus: like in a written page, we don’t read [it as an] image but one line at a time.” Along with the still photographs, which are exhibited as enormous prints, Barbieri has been making short 35mm films. New York—not surprisingly—is next on his list of cities to tackle.

But so far it’s the Las Vegas photographs in which an innate sense of unreality collides most strikingly with Barbieri’s projected vision. The city’s simulated monuments are made to look artificial, in total defiance of their reality. For Barbieri it is “the city as an avatar of itself.”