Portfolios: Vincent Laforet 'AIR'

With his recently released photography book AIR, Pulitzer-prize-winning photographer Vincent Laforet takes the visual art to great extremes—he photographs the world’s cities from a helicopter 5,000 to 12,000 feet in the air. On assignment for Men’s Journal, he proposed shooting New York City from an unusually high altitude to “capture the lines that are formed by the streets at night.” From there, the idea for his book was born. Released in November 2015, AIR features photographs from 10 cities around the world. Shot from a helicopter—an Airbus Helicopter AS350 in the United States and an AS355 in Europe—the images show the street grid systems in place in many cities and the chaotic no-grid systems in others. A tilt-shift lens alters the perspective of some images and achieves a distinctive “diorama effect.” New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Berlin, London, Miami, San Francisco, Barcelona, and Sydney, composed of vastly different color patterns and grids, are captured through his lens, each landscape subtly revealing each city’s own architectural and socioeconomic history.