The photo series distorts the Manhattan cityscape through broken glass reflections

Navid Baraty sees glass facades as optical reflection systems

Photographer Navid Baraty’s Hidden City explores Manhattan through a photographic study of reflection, conception how glass facades they transform the city into layered and fragmented compositions where architecture, geometry and perspective overlap.

While we were photographing from its peaks of Manhattan skyscrapersattention is drawn to the reflective behavior of glass surfaces, where streets, skylines and entire blocks are re-projected into building envelopes. These reflections produce floating urban layers in which familiar elements of the city rearrange and shift according to changes in light and viewing angle.

all images courtesy of Naveen Bharati

The Hidden City series reshapes the Urban Grid Through Reflection

From high points, the Manhattan grid is visually reshaped into mirrored surfaces. Linear streets appear to shift vertically, while building blocks overlap and reassemble into non-linear arrangements. The resulting compositions reveal patterns within the dense geometry of the city, repetitions of windows, shadows and structural lines that are often less visible at street level.

At the same time, the movement of the city is recorded abstractly through these reflections. Traffic flows, pedestrian activity and intersections are translated into faint spatial traces on glass surfaces. The urban environment is rendered as a dual condition: naturally grounded in infrastructure and simultaneously recoded within reflective architectural skins.

Through this process, photographer Navid Baraty presents the city as a system of overlapping spatial readings, where surface, reflection and perspective constantly reorganize the perception of Manhattan’s built environment.

Glass facades in Manhattan act as reflective urban skins