Photographer Gerco De Ruijter has mastered an unconventional photography technique, one that we'd expect to encounter in a fairy tale before hearing of it in real life. De Ruijter attaches his camera to a kite, simply composed of cloth and sticks, and lets the whimsical tripod go where the wind leads. Using a transmitter De Ruijter snaps the shots he senses will entrance, though he never looks through a lens. De Ruijter never even sees the terrain he's photographed until the negatives are developed.
While technically De Ruijter's works could be classified as landscapes, the traditional recipe of land, horizon and sky does not apply. Shot straight from above, the resulting images look more like abstract geometric fields than land formations. Writer Peter Delpeut compares De Ruijter's works to the zig-zagging dreamscapes of Jean Dubuffet, emphasizing the bizarre sensation of experiencing a familiar sight from a new perspective. "Do we experience the landscape in them?" he asks. "They don’t seem to bear any relation to our daily experience of the world around us. What we see is as flat as a pancake, no deeper than the photographic paper, a playful composition of shapes, lines, and colours."
Admire the artworks below and feel the vague sensation of lifting off the ground below you. Trees turn from towering forms to tufts of feathers beneath your feat. Shapes we've seen for years morph into flattened smatterings of hues and textures, showcasing the endless opportunity of even the most basic earthly forms. Just as a child plays with a kite for the first time, De Ruijter encourages viewers to experience something fully alien, a view from the top.
Enjoy the images below and for more unconventional aerial photography check out Andre Ermolaev's psychedelic shots of Icelandic rivers.
