Manhattan is a weird place, a kind of Mecca for people who want to get away from Nature. I found it a sad place; no mountains, no wild trees or animals, squirrels that were all in my face for a peanut instead of running away in fearful innocence. I moved there from Southwest Canada for a short while, and almost every day that I left my building, I would stand bewildered, trying to figure out what direction I was supposed to set out in. More often than not, I would head the wrong way, and be informed by the numbered streets that I was going left instead of right. I would spend days without looking up, and when I did, it would be to see a tiny sliver of sky, and never a single star. Navid Baraty, a Brooklyn-based photographer, decided to show us what we look like down there, scurrying amongst prehistoric rats and roaches, in a perpetual darkness, devoid of natural light and photosynthetic exhalations. He stood atop buildings in Manhattan and turned his lens downward to capture an existence that is uniquely human. Check out a gallery of his photos after the jump…
Photos by Navid Baraty
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