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Photographer

THIS speckled diamond looks like it belongs in an Impressionist painting. In fact, it is a photo of a small island in a lake in northern Poland.

The image comes from , a project by aerial photographer Kacper Kowalski about the complex relationship between humans and nature. To shoot his photos, Kowalski takes to the air in a paramotor or a gyrocopter, which he barely steers to allow the wind to dictate the direction. He sticks to the skies of Pomerania, surrounding his home in Gdynia, and rarely strays more than 150 kilometres from where he sets out.

Despite working within such a small area, Kowalski’s work is incredibly varied, as likely to feature tourists sprawling on a beach as the brightly coloured effluent of a salt production plant. But he often focuses on points of tension or isolation, areas where the natural world has been accommodated, beaten back or abandoned.

With this comes a carefully studied neutrality: while the viewer is invited to judge the image, Kowalski never does so himself. From such a vantage point, the familiar is broken down into shapes and colours, emphasising form rather than content – as befits his training as an architect. With this abstraction comes reflection and the kind of perspective that can only come from distance.