With landscape photography, you usually get only one view — whatever vista lies ahead. But in Parisian photographer Guillaume Amat's playfully subversive images, the viewer also gets a surprising peek at what lurks behind.
(Amat's photographs feature mirrors to reflect what's going on opposite the picture. The mirror's reflection is Amat's starting point, and from there everything has to line up perfectly — the tilt of his large-format camera, the distance between the lens and his homemade standing mirror, the use and position of a human subject.
The result of such meticulousness (the process is such that it takes a whole day to create a single photograph) is an image that surprises, delights, and sometimes haunts. With the help of several assistants, the photographer plays the part of magician, showing you the trick, but also leaving you wondering what else you're missing. (To see more of Guillaume Amat's work, check out his website.)
"I'm interested in creating a new perspective within the context of the image," Amat said in an interview, "by blurring the boundaries between the real and fiction, reality and invention."
Enjoy a selection of Amat's beautifully deceptive photographs below.
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