Every city in the world has a unique skyline defined by its architecture and landscape. Photographing the city with the camera leveled and pointed straight up, provides a way to compare cities, identify their unique spatial fingerprints, and reinforce a different notion of skyline. The process brings back a sense of youthful discovery–the feeling of lying in grass and looking to the sky–finding shapes in the clouds, trees, or in this case between buildings and their surroundings. The abstract point of view shown in these photographs challenges the viewer–particularly in a world where we often look straight ahead, or mostly down. To date I’ve covered twenty-four cities in thirteen countries and have found that each city, viewed this way, has a vocabulary that is unique, refreshing, and somehow, happily familiar.
Kids do it all the time—lying on the grass, looking to the sky and visualizing shapes in the clouds. As adults, we don’t often have this luxury of time, and if we do, it’s rarely spent on our backs in grassy fields. Our time is in urban environments with a type of tunnel vision traveling from point A to point B, driving, taking a metro, walking quickly, staring straight ahead avoiding others, or looking down at our smartphones, papers or pavement. This collection, titled Straight Up plays homage to the kid lying in the grass except in this case looking straight up in city environments.
Every city in the world has a unique skyline defined by its architecture and landscape. Photographing these cities with the camera leveled and pointed straight up, provides a way to compare them. The resulting images show open spaces between buildings, lamp posts, street signs, trees, etc., and create unique shapes. These shapes repeat, subtly change, and create a cadence of visual forms, familiar yet distinct for each city. Grouping these images together forms a type of language—a spatial fingerprint—that reflect the history, culture, economics, and needs of the city reflected in its built environment. Each city is photographed in the same manner and as the viewpoints are exactly the same, images within and between cities are easily compared. It’s a microcosm of the familiar skyline, accessible to anyone who stops, looks up, and takes note.

The concept for Straight Up, born in New York City, has now grown to encompass twenty-four cities in thirteen countries.