For his digital collage series, Misplaced, Brooklyn-based designer and photographer Anton Repponen plucked 11 of New York’s famous landmarks from their urban environment and digitally inserted them into desolate landscapes. Out of context, these concrete giants and steel-and-glass towers appear as though they’re futuristic spaceships that have just landed on alien planets.
Scattered across sand dunes, mud flats, and barren plains, the misplaced architectural monuments include some New York’s most famous museums and business centers, designed by the world’s renowned architects. Each photo from the series is accompanied by intriguing stories written by Jon Earle.
The cylindrical Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is depicted rising from seemingly uninhabited “volcanic mudflats of X,” where humorously, Earle writes, “Ticket sales have been sluggish.” In another image, the concrete, brutalist Breuer Building finds itself in the middle of a dry, desert landscape. The building itself recalls when it was first built, saying, “There’s only one window because the glass was so hot none of the guys would touch it. Nah, I’m just kidding. Breuer wanted it that way. I kind of like it; it’s like a cyclops eye or a barnacle or something.”
You can find the whole narrative behind this fictional phenomenon here. You can also buy prints from the series on Society6.