Adjusting focus with an anamorphic artist: an architect by training, Argentine Augusto Zanela contests one's perception of the optical processes of image formations through photography, video, and installations.

• Author: Snow, K. Mitchell
• Position: Biography

From the street, it looks as if some unfortunate person has dropped a large bottle of ink onto the white marble steps of the Secretariat of Culture in Buenos Aires. On the landing just above the steps is a television screen that challenges that interpretation of reality. The screen presents a view from the building onto Alvear Avenue. Spectators see themselves clearly standing in the entrance doors. The seemingly formless pools of black that stain the stairs, however, are transformed into a group of people. Step past the doors and you see yourself among them--or rather on top of them.

Welcome to the playful urban interventions of Argentine architect and photographer Augusto Zanela. For more than a decade, he's been turning public spaces in Buenos Aires--and more recently in Spain and the United States--into human-sized optical illusions, engaging audiences in entertaining and instructive visual reminders that you can't always believe what you see. The reality we perceive, he constantly shows us, depends on our point of view.

Despite the medium's reputation for veracity, the photographer's point of view has always been highly subjective. Zanela's photographs aim to bring that subjectivity into focus for the viewer.

His professional career in photography began early. While he was an architecture student at the School of Architecture, Design, and Urbanism of the University of Buenos Aires, the school's student center launched an initiative to create a photography course. The center selected Zanela's proposal, though it went beyond what the organizers initially anticipated, and the university's Photography Workshop was born under his leadership. Zanela has served as the workshop's director since its first session in 1991.

The ideas that proved decisive in shaping his photographic vision came, however, from his architecture studies.

Zanela is a practitioner of the art of anamorphosis, one of the more rigorous forms of geometric perspective. Simply defined, an anamorph is a deformed shape that takes on a recognizable form when viewed from a specific, usually extreme, angle. Because we are accustomed to looking at images straight on, these acute angles provide a decidedly different perspective.

As Lawrence Wright explains in his Perspective in Perspective, "We prefer an ordered world, regular patterns, familiar forms, and when flaws or distortions occur, provided they are not too gross, our mind's eye tidies them up. We see what we want or expect to see."

Anamorphic art burst onto the pages of history during the Renaissance as part of the development of perspective. It flowered in the ensuing centuries. Perhaps the most famous instance of anamorphic art is Hans Holbein's mysterious painting The Ambassadors. It looks like a straightforward portrait of two distinguished gentlemen that has been somehow marred by an oblong blotch of ivory paint in the bottom quarter of the canvas. Stand at a designated angle to the painting, however, and the blob becomes a skull. If viewers of his time understood the intentions that motivated this macabre visual message, no one recorded them. The painting's meaning is still a subject of controversy.

Zanela's introduction to anamorphic figures came through another Renaissance master--Michelangelo. As part of his architecture coursework, Zanela was assigned to analyze...