DESPITE THE ADVANCES of civilization and technology, nature is still the greatest influence on the man-made environment. The shapes and patterns in the natural world, the profile of mountains and the arcs of rivers all have their echoes in the cities we build. Trees are as essential to the urban landscape as houses. And increasingly, humans have made their mark on nature in fields, clifftop settlements and artificial islands. From the air we see how this interdependence shapes the world: the interplay between straight line and curve, brickwork and greenery, hillside and housing block.
“The great advantage of nature is that you can find it everywhere: not just in rural areas, but on the edge of cities or in forests all over Europe. It’s more accessible than the deserts or large expanses of water that you need a boat to get to. I like to find traces of humanity in nature: I look for castles in the forest in Austria or Germany, or little villages in the Dolomites, or a road that leads to a bridge. So many structures lead to or blend in with nature that I can very quickly find interesting things to photograph. And I can put the drone wherever I like, so the objects in the picture aren’t there by accident. What I like to do is frame the shot or position the drone to manipulate the viewer’s eye: even a group of trees or a mountainside, seen from a certain angle, can remind you of a city skyline. It’s what my style of photography is all about, showing people nature in the city, but also elements of the city in nature.”
LIKE THE OCEAN the desert is a vast, often hostile expanse that man can never fully tame. At first it seems barren and endless. But from above the traces of human ingenuity become evident. A truck travelling along a dusty road. A camel train passing a pyramid. A house by an oasis. And in Dubai, a modern city rising from the sands, complete with ornate water channels. We see the human imagination constantly pushing back the sky.
“I love the colours in deserts: the orange of the sand and the blue of the sky. It’s the same combination you find in cities at night, when the dark blue streets are bathed in orangey-yellow light. There is a very strong aesthetic in the way the dunes are shaped over time, the waveforms they get from the wind. Taking photographs in the daytime is less disturbing in deserts than on water because sand doesn’t reflect light and the shadows of the dunes create natural patterns of light and shade that I can play with.
“It can be challenging to find man-made structures, but here and there I come across an oasis in Dubai or Abu Dhabi where someone has planted one or two trees that stand out amid the dunes, or there are roads traversing the desert. I find Dubai fascinating: the entire city has been built in a few decades, so there’s a much greater concentration of modern architecture than anywhere else in the world. Even the smallest details, like the elevated metro, look like something from a futuristic film. There’s a harmony to the place that I find very pleasing.”
THE FIRST HUMAN SETTLEMENTS were shaped by water, on coastlines and beside rivers, but increasingly water has been shaped by man. By building dams, draining swamps and constructing canal networks, people throughout history have tried to create firm boundaries between land and water. But our relationship with water is a complicated one: we depend on it for life, transport our goods on it and even play in it, but it remains one of the most powerful and devastating forces in nature.
“Water is always fascinating, regardless of what time of day it is, the season of the year or the weather conditions. I like to show the power of water, but also how it looks when it’s completely calm, such as a lake when there’s no wind and it resembles a blue carpet. Sometimes I’m drawn to the shapes and textures of water in nature, other times I like to show the ingenuity of water engineering. The Veluwemeer aqueduct in Hardewijk, in the Netherlands, is a combination of nature and man-made water, where you see boats passing over the top of a road that dips below the water level. It’s very eye-catching and makes the viewer reflect and analyze what they’re looking at.
“When I’m photographing water I prefer a day without sun. You don’t want to shoot at midday when the sun is directly above you, because the water looks like it’s burning. It’s very difficult to correct that effect in editing. I prefer sunsets, when the light is descending towards the horizon and looks more intense, as if it’s traversing the sky. It creates a gradient and a contrast in colour between the water and the light.”
CITIES ARE MORE than mere clusters of buildings. Viewing them from the air reveals the threads of roads, the pitch of roofs, the colours and contours of parks. The culture of a city determines whether its streets are broad, sweeping boulevards or teeming, intimate alleyways. And even the most modern city has to make concessions to its environment: a hillside, the bend of a river or the aridness of a desert all influence what buildings are placed among them.
“When I look at a city from the air, even if I’ve never seen it before, I can tell what country or region it’s in from the layout. Italian cities are my favorites, with their densely concentrated houses and maze-like streets, while in Spain the buildings are strung out in a line and you see the same colours on all the roofs. Paris is more monochrome, with boulevards converging on these big axes and everything is grey or beige. I want to show things that people don’t see from the ground and give them a different perspective, so sometimes I point the drone straight down and other times I set it at an angle to include the skyline. When I shot the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona I included the surrounding buildings because the cathedral itself is so well known from picture postcards. But what people don’t realise is that the city is designed on a geometric grid with the buildings in identical squares and the cathedral fits exactly into that pattern. So I pulled right back and let the surrounding roads guide the viewer towards the cathedral right in the middle of the photo.”
