Olivo Barbieri moved from photographing provincial cities and pinball machines in the late 1970s to artificial illumination, urbanization in China, and aerial views of global cities. After finding that reality looked fantastical when he tried to record it objectively, he began treating photography both as a record of place and as an image shaped by scale and modes of looking. In Viaggio in Italia, Artificial Illuminations, and site specific_, long exposures, selective focus, and aerial photography trace how cities come to resemble images produced by advertising, models, tourism, and planning.
Barbieri introduced the shallow focus of a close-up model photograph into aerial views that appear to survey an entire city. Roads and buildings remain visible across a broad area, yet only a limited zone is sharp, so the viewer cannot immediately decide what matters. His early work in Viaggio in Italia turned from landmark-centered images of Italy toward everyday provincial cities. In his night photographs, long exposures accumulated the time through which artificial light shapes a city’s appearance. In site specific_, aerial photography, tilt and swing movements, and color adjustments unsettle the feeling that the city has been seen in full. Urban photography thereby came to address the scale and sequence through which we understand a city, as well as its physical form.
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Contents · Table of Contents
Modena and Bologna in the 1970s: Turning Toward Everyday Images
Born in Carpi in 1954, Barbieri began photographing seriously in the early 1970s while studying education in Bologna. For Flippers (1977–78), he photographed pinball machines left in a warehouse, tracing the arrival of American popular culture in provincial Italy through painted imagery, metal, and reflections from electric bulbs*23. Luigi Ghirri, whom he met around this time, introduced younger artists to photographers ranging from Eugène Atget and August Sander to William Eggleston and Stephen Shore*26. Photography became a way to examine how signs, commodities, roads, and suburbs organize everyday vision. Barbieri’s participation in Viaggio in Italia in 1984 connected this interest to provincial cities and suburban landscapes*21.
The More Objective the Record, the Stranger Reality Appears
Barbieri has recalled that his attempt to describe the surrounding world objectively and almost clinically produced photographs in which the world appeared fantastical*26. A camera retains the forms of buildings and objects while introducing color, scale, and cropping that differ from human vision. He has described his primary concern as the “image” more than “photography” because the same place acquires different forms of reality through photographs, advertising, cinema, architectural models, and tourism posters*3. A public conversation organized by MAXXI likewise presents him as an artist who has long worked between the real and the virtual*2.
Artificial Light and Long Exposure: How a City Produces Its Nightly Appearance
In the 1980s series Artificial Illuminations, Barbieri used long exposures to photograph nocturnal sites lit by combinations of fluorescent, incandescent, and natural light. Film records the color temperatures of these sources differently from the human eye. Barbieri used that discrepancy to produce pink skies, roads glowing green or blue, and windows whose light redraws the city’s outline*26. As the exposure lengthens, business hours, domestic illumination, traffic, and the duration of electrical power accumulate in a single frame. An account of Ersatz Lights similarly describes how varied light sources across the world transform cities into artificially colored environments*12. A retrospective spanning the early night photographs and later aerial work showed the continuity of his interest in how photographic conditions turn real places into different images*18.
From Ground Level to the Air: Changing the Scale of the City
site specific_ began in 2004 and developed across Rome, Montreal, Las Vegas, Shanghai, New York, and other cities. MAXXI notes that Barbieri had used selective focus since the 1990s and, from 2003 onward, photographed more than forty cities from the air*25. He has said that after September 11 he reversed his position, moving from the threatened body on the ground to the side flying above it*11. From a helicopter, roads, monuments, people, and cars approach the same pictorial plane. Temporarily suspending bodily experience at street level allowed him to examine the distances and scales that produce a sense of understanding the city.
Tilt-Shift Photography: A Panoramic View with Only a Local Area in Focus
The tilt and swing movements of a view camera incline the plane of focus, leaving only part of the frame sharp*6. When foreground and background blur, an actual city can resemble a model photographed at close range*13. Aerial photographs often show broad areas evenly and encourage confidence that the whole can be grasped. Barbieri inserted shallow focus into this viewpoint, bringing the surveying gaze into conflict with a gaze that can read only a local area. Changes in color and the simplification of detail also disrupt habitual vision and prompt attention to the relation between reality and its depiction*8. The viewer sees the city widely while continually deciding which areas can serve as points of orientation.
The City as Its Own Avatar: Tourism, Models, and Redevelopment
Architectural plans and redevelopment projects circulate through models and computer-generated images before completion, then through aerial footage, maps, and advertising after they are built. Barbieri has called the city “an avatar of itself,” describing how a physical place already operates through substitute images*15. Arquitectura Viva likewise positions his work as an investigation of perception and the interpretation of reality*14. Las Vegas, Shanghai, Rome, the Great Wall, and Niagara Falls enter the same project so that widely circulated images known before a visit can be compared with the physical sites. Aperture describes site specific_ as an inquiry into how places around the world are transformed within visual culture*7. His interest in theme parks extends this inquiry to cities that operate in their entirety as apparatuses of display*9.
Site Specific: Las Vegas 05: Turning a Staged City into a Model Once More
MoMA’s Site Specific: Las Vegas 05 (2005) presents hotels, roads, parking lots, pools, and people as components of an immense entertainment apparatus*5. In Las Vegas, architecture imitates other cities and historical periods, while light and moving images continually renew its surfaces. Selective focus makes this constructed reality appear even more model-like, emphasizing that the city itself is organized through staging and replication. As Aperture’s account notes, Barbieri used tilt-shift techniques in Rome and Las Vegas but adjusted his method in Shanghai to the specific character of that city*7.
Shanghai, New York, and London: Adjusting Focus and Altitude for Each City
The method of site specific_ changes from city to city. In Shanghai, towers and unfinished ground surfaces form one structure; in New York, dense blocks and monuments form another; in London, Olympic redevelopment meets existing infrastructure. A conversation about work made in China, India, and London describes the project as a reflection on rapidly changing cities and the scale of the human figure within them*9. The London exhibition similarly identified the form of the contemporary city as a central subject*19. By varying the focused area, altitude, and color from one city to another, Barbieri showed both a shared visual standard and the differences among individual places.
Photography, Film, and Editing Thousands of Frames
Barbieri makes thousands of exposures in each city and reduces them to roughly a dozen final images. Editing—deciding which images will condense the city’s structure—occupies a central place in the work*11. Collections and archives at SFMOMA and ICP show that still photographs and moving images were produced within the same site specific_ project*4. A photograph stops one arrangement; film retains the helicopter’s movement and the passage of time. A photobook bringing together ten years of aerial work moves between the differences among cities and the recurring patterns of roads, crowds, and architecture*16.
From Viaggio in Italia to Global Cities: A Changing Question About Landscape Images
The continuity between Barbieri’s early work and his aerial photography can be missed when attention settles on the miniature effect alone. Photographs of cars, fruit, suburbs, and night scenes discussed by The Guardian also contain moments when ordinary objects resemble advertisements or stage sets*17. Viaggio in Italia began by turning away from the “beautiful Italy” fixed by postcards and toward suburbs, arterial roads, and everyday provincial cities. MAXXI describes Luigi Ghirri, Gabriele Basilico, and Guido Guidi through their respective attention to familiar landscapes, urban form, and vernacular places*25. Barbieri carried this problem into artificial illumination, construction in China, and aerial photography of global cities, making the power of images that operate before a place is seen into his subject. An exhibition devoted to his long-term work in China likewise foregrounded the parallel processes of rapid construction and the production of urban images*24.
In Comparison with Andreas Gursky: Total Information and the Break in Focus
Andreas Gursky also used elevated viewpoints, large-format color, cities, and crowds to gather structures of contemporary society within a single image. The Met explains that during the 1990s Gursky enlarged his prints to architectural scale and addressed urban landscapes and interiors shaped by industry, electronics, and automation*20. Information extends across a broad area in Gursky’s photographs, and the viewer moves through details to follow the larger system. Barbieri confines sharpness to local zones and leaves extensive blur, destabilizing the grounds on which any part of the picture should be selected for attention.
Miniaturization as Critique: Preserving the Record While Questioning Scale and Center
Barbieri’s photographs retain the arrangement of buildings, roads, vehicles, and people that stood before the camera. Once the plane of focus, altitude, and color are altered, the question concerns both the facts recorded and the scale, distance, and hierarchy through which those facts are understood. A conversation with the artist describes transformations of color and viewpoint that encourage several judgments about a place*10. An essay on perceptual disturbance argues that his work turns the command often associated with aerial vision into an experience of continually deciding which areas of the image can be trusted*13. MAXXI’s retrospective organized provincial cities, artificial illumination, reproductions of paintings, China, and aerial photography as one sustained inquiry*1. Spazi Altri likewise showed how selective focus developed through three decades of photographing rapid social, economic, and architectural change in China*22. Miniaturization serves as more than an effect that turns cities into toys; it allows centers produced by development, tourism, national commemoration, and capital to be reconsidered as temporary arrangements.
- Andreas Gursky — Through elevated viewpoints and large-format color, he organized global cities, consumption, and crowds as single fields of information.
- Bernd and Hilla Becher — Their method of turning architecture into comparable typologies became a foundation for later photography that reads the city structurally.
- Thomas Demand — He reconstructs reality as a model before photographing it, testing the relation between photography and the model from another direction.
- Conceptual Art — From a skepticism toward the medium — ‘I am interested in images, not photographs’ — he made the city an object of critique through optical transformation.
- Large-Format Color Photography — Brings the city into the exhibition space at a scale that preserves detail and supports wall-size viewing.