Finding Up in Down
A photographic dive into puddle POV
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Sometimes the simplest ideas are the most captivating. We’ve all imagined the bizarro worlds that exist on the other side of reflections, but photographer Manuel Plantin’s disorienting photos make those alternate realities their primary focus.
“I don’t really go out for these pictures. I never leave home without a camera and when it starts raining and I see a shot, I go for it,” he says.
Shot through the streets’ thin membrane of water in his home city of Strasbourg, France, Plantin’s photos incorporate the layered distortions of the water, its leaves and other debris that add a painterly grit and texture on the quick shots he takes. The common visual tropes of street photography — stop signs and street lamps, the tops of buildings and of course the people themselves — seem somehow to be given new life from this most simple of maneuvers.
“I fully embrace Zappa’s definition of art — ‘making something out of nothing and then selling it,’” he says. “In my case turning depressing pavements into pictures evocative of the impressionist paintings [I’ve adored] since my childhood.”
Plantin began shooting these images as a lark back in 2011. As a fan of Saul Leiter’s iconic New York street photography, themselves rich in rainy reflections, he had been inspired to play with these urban mirrors in his own street photography.
Posting the images online, commenters started encouraging him to flip the images upside down. At first, “I didn’t feel like it, because I hadn’t framed them this way,” he says. “Coming back from work on a very rainy day, I shot my first reflections. Framed up to the knees of the people entering or exiting the frame. I was pretty excited when I opened up the files in Lightroom: four or five of the 20+ shots were keepers, and two of them are still among my favorites.”
Plantin looks for a convergence of flat surfaces, color, a bright background and a person entering or leaving the frame to anchor his images. He tries to keep things gestural, using manual mode and never cropping, with minimal edits afterwards. As for shooting upside-down, he says it’s just a matter of practice with the viewfinder.
“It’s not street photo per se, but it’s shot the same way. I don’t have much time to frame because people move fast,” he says. “Compared to classic street photo, they generally don’t care because even when I’m very close, my camera is pointed to the ground … French people are very sensitive about street photo because of our law protecting ‘right of image’, an ambiguous concept clearly handicapping street shooters.”
Lacking any 6x6 medium format gear among the Leicas (M8 and M Monochrom), he usually uses to shoot these photos, Plantin also has a parallel version of this series shot with an iPhone for the sake of creating square frames. It’s an example of how his reflections are really just that — photography for its own sake, and not intended for taking any firm aesthetic, technical or conceptual stances. As the deputy editor of a regional newspaper, Plantin is content to keep his photo work personal anyway, if only to leave the serious stuff to the professionals. “We have staff photographers I don’t want to have problems with :-)” he said over email.
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