Sam Haskins – Japanese Bamboo Forest (197X)

Hallelujah! A skinny frame photograph that isn’t bullshit.

Why? You ask.

Well, it’s partly because it’s a super wide angle (or fisheye) lens. But that doesn’t mean that just because you use a fish eye lens that you’ve suddenly gotten a license to skinny frame all over everything.

What makes this work is that it wasn’t take as a skinny frame image, it was taken horizontally with the intention of eventually being displayed vertically.

What makes it in-fucking-credible is the way the direction of several of the bamboo stalks is so inconsistent from the rest, the suffused light and the fact that you see the warping distortion of the ground that makes you wander if you’re laying in a ditch looking up or suspended from above looking down into a strange upside down world.