TEDx talk: Flying (really) high with Vincent Laforet
posted Monday, December 28, 2015 at 5:04 PM EDT
Photographer Vincent Laforet recently did a TEDx Talk (seen below) about his AIR project, in which he discusses the motivations behind AIR and how the project came to fruition.
It all started when Laforet was hired to capture images to accompany a Men's Health magazine article about psychology and finding order in chaos. Laforet thought of aerial images of rivers as synapses and cities shot from above as perhaps looking like circuitry. Eventually he was able to convince his client to let him go up 8,000 feet above New York City at night to capture images, something nobody had done before.
He recalls when he was doing aerial photography in a helicopter over Las Vegas, which is itself already 2,000 feet above sea level. Flying up 12,000 feet to capture a very wide angle shot of Las Vegas at night surrounded by the pitch black desert, Laforet's legs had both fallen asleep. Once they reached altitude, he had to literally move his legs using his arms. With only a harness between him and a frighteningly long fall back to Earth, he uses his camera as a shield of sorts and lets the beautiful landscapes before him distract him from the perilous possibilities.
With AIR still only an inkling in his mind at this point, Laforet's aerial images from New York, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles were being shared all over the internet. He asked himself "why?" realizing that people were able to look at aerial images of cities and see something more in the patterns. Huge cities with many large buildings were made to look small and there was order to be found in the chaos. His unique imagery spoke to viewers in a new way and the seemingly familiar was fresh again.
Travelling to other cities such as San Francisco, London, Barcelona, Berlin, and more, Laforet was able to see that we are all much more connected than we realize. To hear more of the valuable lessons that he learned throughout his project, watch the full video above.
For more information on Vincent Laforet and his work, see here. You can order his book AIR here for shipping this coming March.
(Seen via DIY Photography and PetaPixel)