Extreme Angle
Images seen from sharply high, low or tilted viewpoints that distort scale and make familiar things look strange.
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About
An extreme angle abandons the comfortable eye-level view. Looking steeply up makes a figure loom, looking straight down flattens a street into pattern, and a tilted horizon adds instability. Painters used the device long before photography: Andrea Mantegna's Lamentation over the Dead Christ (about 1480) presents the body from the soles of the feet, Baroque ceiling painters such as Andrea Pozzo showed saints soaring overhead, and Edgar Degas, alert to Japanese prints, favoured raised, cropped vantage points.
The camera made the approach central to modern image-making. In the 1920s Alexander Rodchenko photographed balconies, stairwells and radio masts from steep positions above and below, and László Moholy-Nagy looked down from Berlin's radio tower. Aerial photography, from balloons in the 1850s to drones today, turned landscape into abstraction. Look for strong foreshortening, a tipped horizon or no horizon at all.