Mysterious Silhouettes Stand in Surreal Portals to Imaginary New Worlds

By manipulating photographs with a mix of different digital editing skills, photographer Nate Hill contorts stunning landscapes into surreal swirls, revealing imaginary portals to alternate worlds. At the center of each of his circling scenes is one tiny silhouette, paused before the center of the spiral, as if contemplating a leap into a distant realm.

To create the phantasmagorical effect, Hill explains in Instagram comments that he uses iPhone apps like RollWorld to twist the natural backdrops, plus ones like Matter to place the single silhouetted figures in the invented settings. Though the meanings of the images are left open to interpretation, he often pairs his Instagram posts with mystifying captions—like “strange loop,” “logic of a dream,” and “silence of solitude”—as if suggesting the lonely expanses of unanswered questions we encounter when lost in wormholes of thought.