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The summer poetry of swimming pools from above

The pictures by Brad Walls turn holiday memories into art

The summer poetry of swimming pools from above The pictures by Brad Walls turn holiday memories into art

In the field of photography, aerial photography is a modern style that offers, literally, the most innovative perspectives on reality. And Brad Walls, an Australian aerial photographer known as @bradscanvas on Instagram, has taken advantage of these perspectives for his new project Pools From Above, which explores the shapes and colours of the pools he came across on his travels. The idea behind the project is a mixture of personal experience and artistic inspiration: once leafing through Annie Kelly's book Splash: The Art of the Swimming Pool, the photographer has found a way to artistically represent one of the most frequent scenes in the summers of his childhood.

The apparent bi-dimensionality acquired by the pools seen from above highlights the often overlooked nature of design objects, especially in relation to the human presence that, shrinking, appears in some of the aerial photographs. As the photographer himself pointed out: 

I fell in love with the lines, curves and negative space of the pools, which - without alternate perspective from a drone - would have been lost. 

Walls' shots represent a real tour of the South Pacific pools, starting from Sydney and Byron Bay to Bali, the Philippines and Malaysia. The goal, however, is to expand the series and capture the pools of the world, from Palm Springs to those of the Mediterranean and Mexico and to turn this experience into an illustrated book.