Taken from Above

What’s cool about Bangkok is that it has an incredible number of rooftop bars. I took these photos from Above Eleven as I always try to visit Peruvian restaurants when going here or there.

Though I often push the sky’s colors in different directions when shooting and editing, my home city (Lima) is known for having a grey sky most of the year. Yet it’s not really a sad grey, but rather a chromatic one. Sometimes, late at night, it does take on a strange reddish tone. That's cool to me because it looks surreally fake, as if it could be easily blown away.

I remember that when I was in high school, I found a huge rooftop on top of a shopping mall. The fooftop was so big that it made me think of a landing field for people having out-of-body experiences (you’re supposed to envision a place to spawn if you want to achieve one). That place (if visited just after sunset) used to fill with flocks of small birds flying very low, not too far from the viewer. That was super pretty. I never took pictures of that. But from then on, I developed a penchant for rooftop shots.

I think, to a point, the beauty of the sky above the city reflects how what is limitless (the sky) becomes a kind of negative space to what is human. It puts things into scale. Everything minimizes to the extreme. The city unfolds as a maze with constant flow yet stagnancy within the concrete walls. Still, when taking these shots in Bangkok, I thought of other rooftops and places, and they all feel like variations of the same place: a bit of a threshold where the human scale dissolves. The sky, somehow, flattens time and memories.