Navid Baraty sees Glass Facades as Systems of Visual Reflection
Hidden City by photographer Navid Baraty explores Manhattan through a photographic study of reflection, capturing how glass facades transform the city into layered and fragmented compositions where architecture, geometry, and perspective overlap.
While photographing from the tops of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, attention is directed toward the reflective behavior of glass surfaces, where streets, skylines, and entire blocks are reprojected onto building envelopes. These reflections produce suspended urban layers in which familiar elements of the city are reorganized and displaced according to changes in light and viewing angle.
all images courtesy of Navid Baraty
Hidden City series Reconfigures Urban Grid Through Reflection
From elevated viewpoints, Manhattan’s grid becomes visually reconfigured across mirrored surfaces. Linear streets appear to shift vertically, while building clusters overlap and reassemble in non-linear arrangements. The resulting compositions reveal patterns within the city’s dense geometry, repetitions of windows, shadows, and structural lines that are often less perceptible at street level.
At the same time, the movement of the city is registered in abstraction through these reflections. Traffic flows, pedestrian activity, and intersections are translated into faint spatial traces across glass surfaces. The urban environment is rendered as a dual condition: physically grounded in infrastructure and simultaneously re-encoded within reflective architectural skins.
Through this process, photographer Navid Baraty presents the city as a system of overlapping spatial readings, where surface, reflection, and perspective continuously reorganize the perception of Manhattan’s built environment.
glass facades in Manhattan act as reflective urban skins
streets and skylines are reprojected onto building surfaces
reflection reorganizes the city into layered visual fields
entire blocks appear suspended within reflective envelopes
the cityscape splits and reassembles in reflection
