As everybody knows, Sicily is a big island in the Mediterranean Sea, born from Mount Etna, a volcano near Catania. The sandy beaches here are almost all private. In order to enable citizens to take advantage of the sea, the city built a solarium. On this great wooden platform, every year summer plays out as if on the stage of a Greek theater.

Suspended over a lava formation, with nature (the sea) on one side and civilization (the city) on the other side, time seems almost suspended in the dazzling democracy of being together: An island in the island.

Olivo Barbieri became known for creating photographs that seem like miniature architectural models through the use of tilt-shift lenses and a shallow depth of field. In his recent series, “Site Specific,” he investigates the urban scene through images in which he compresses spatial qualities and applies, in post production, what he calls “selective coloration,” a process that further abstracts these scenes of controlled chaos. Photo above, “Catania 09” © Olivo Barbieri, courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery New York. Site Specific, Barbieri’s 10-year project to record the world’s cities with aerial phogotraps, will be published by Aperture in September.