PARTING SHOT
OLIVO BARBIERI takes the pictures God might take. He hires a helicopter, soars over Las Vegas or the Colosseum or an Adriatic beach, and shoots downward with a tilt-shift lens. The weird result: The world appears transformed into a tabletop model populated by tiny human insects. The photographer calls the effect “a new kind of urban sublime,” evoking the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who, upon viewing Mont Blanc in 1817, wrote that he entered “a trance sublime and strange.”