Photographer Markus Brunetti has spent years relentlessly honing the craft of capturing, compositing, and printing giant (up to 10’) representations of Europe’s cathedrals. Khoi Vinh writes,
Brunetti creates stunning photographs of European cathedrals from countless source images that he takes and painstakingly composites into photographic equivalents of elevation drawings. The results are intricately unreal; perspective is dramatically flattened, light is almost impossibly even, and all signs of human activity are removed—in effect, Brunetti reconstructs the original architectural ideal that motivated each structure.
Enjoy:
[YouTube]
I was in NYC about a month ago on a gallery crawl and lucked into seeing this exhibit “in the flesh”, so to speak. When I saw the write-up on this exhibit, I was struck by the similarities of the work of the Bechtels, who shot industrial objects–plants/factories, water towers, etc.–in a similar fashion, but combined images of those individual objects into what Edward Tufte would call “small multiples”–one large image that combines many individuals images, much like a yearbook photo page. The most striking of these images were the large prints–roughly 6 feet tall–of individual cathedrals. I’m assuming the photographer shot these from away, to minimize perspective problems, and shot horizontally across the image field, combined multiple images across into a strip, repeating that approach with overlaps from the top down (or bottom up), then combined the strips, and then finally corrected for perspective. The only problem is that the gallery staff on duty the day I was there didn’t know (and clearly didn’t know enough about Photoshop technique to fully understand my questions). In the end the work was stunning and kept me in the gallery for at least 1/2 hour for that small set of images. Kudos to the photographer for his very impressive documentary photography work! Thanks for finding and posting the YouTube video; appreciated.