Bruno Cals’ vertical landscapes

At first look, the Horizons series by Brazilian photographer Bruno Cals might appear to be standard landscape shots of barren and unusual scenery, but on closer inspection, the seemingly run-of-the-mill landscape photographs turn out to be something completely different. Some pieces resemble sun-baked desert landscapes as they meet searing blue skies, but are in fact stone-clad buildings captured as the photographer points his camera upwards, placing the horizon in the middle of the frame. Some photographs feature artificially lit structures as they meet the night sky, shot in such as way as to resemble a sci-fi vision of an alien terrain.

Bruno Cals, Untitled 1 (2011), Archival Chromogenic Print

“He is presenting landscapes and trying to misleads the eye by presenting something very commonplace,” says Andrew Klug, co-founder of New York’s 1500 Gallery, which is currently exhibiting the series. “The effect is one of a very unusual perspective to take a commonplace object and make it unrecognisable.”

The show at 1500 Gallery in West Chelsea is curated by Brazilian modernist photographer Boris Kossoy. “In this exhibition, Bruno Cals presents a reflection on space and time – a riveting reflection over intermediate eras and possible civilizations, extinct or yet unborn, not necessarily human,” Kossoy writes in his curatorial text. “How do our minds react to the unknown, to empty landscapes lacking historical context?”