photo series distorts manhattan’s cityscape through fractured glass reflections

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

vertical shifts emerge where streets appear to climb facades

windows, shadows, and structural lines form abstract patterns

movement in the city registers as surface distortion

reflective skins encode movement within architectural surfaces

perspective continuously reorganizes Manhattan’s spatial reading

the city appears grounded and suspended simultaneously

project info:

name: Hidden City
photographer: Navid Baraty | @navidbaraty

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edited by: christina vergopoulou | designboom

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