honolulu hawaii

source: hifructose

Honolulu, Hawaii based photographer and designer Petey Ulatan often creates images that explore the impossible. A recent series, which Ulatan posts to his Instagram page, takes this idea and applies it to infinite scenarios: digital photo-manipulations of his own photographs from his travels, others from Google images, that re-shape the world as if it were folded into a giant cube.

“I like to describe myself as a photographer with a graphic designer’s heart. I’ve been designing since I could pick up a pencil and taking photographs for as long as I remember,” Ulatan shares. It should come as no surprise that Ulatan is a fan of science fiction films and minimalist architecture, whose images resemble Inception’s mind-bending dream landscapes, or the thematic perspectives in Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

What began as a fun experiment took Ulatan several months to perfect, discovering how simple changes can alter our perception of the picture entirely. “For some images, I would mask out the sky and add another layer of another photo of a sky to create the illusion that it’s coming from one world.” Some of his most astonishing images are of surfers riding up an epic tidal wave, or the inverted skylines of actual cities. Each involves a subtle play on reflection and symmetry, elements from our reality turned into a lucid dream world.
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source: designboom

petey ulatan sees the world a little differently. the honolulu-based creative likes to ask ‘what if’ — what if the world was flat? what if our universe had different laws of physics? what would it look like? with these musings in mind and an artistic inclination, ulatan creates mind-bendingly manipulated landscapes that warp the perception of the world around us.

drawing from popular movies like ‘inception’ and ‘interstellar’ — surreal films where the laws of physics are turned on their head — ulatan creates cubic landscapes that ‘flatten’ views of natural and urban panoramas. oceans are bent at 90 degree angles, where water flows horizontally and vertically at the same time; skies are squared within curiously angular cloudscapes; and cities are seen folding over themselves, where skyscrapers stand on their sides. images from the surreal series — some of which ulatan has made into moving media — reshape reality into a warped world of familiar, yet undoubtedly distorted scenes. ‘we have the power to take the natural beauty we see around us further and create our own worlds,’ he describes. ‘I find it particularly gratifying to be able to do that.’