Cornice and sky: how James Bacchi’s decade of iPhone photography becomes IN THE SKY

The photographer who looks up is making a choice. Not the face, not the crowd, not the gesture at eye level — but the vertical axis, the line from where you stand to where the building ends and whatever sky there is begins. James Bacchi has worked this single compositional commitment since 2015, photographing with an iPhone, always in black and white, always in cities: San Francisco first, then New York, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Paris, Budapest. That the tool is a phone is integral to the proposition. iPhoneography occupies an uneasy position between vernacular snapshot culture and the deliberate-frame practice of fine art photography; Bacchi’s project has always asked whether a phone camera can be used with the same intentionality as any analogue instrument — one frame, one decision, one open sky at a time.

Portrait of James Bacchi, iPhoneographer and author of the photography book IN THE SKY — James Bacchi, iPhoneographer. Image: Baroque Medusa Media

IN THE SKY, now announced by Baroque Medusa Media, collects that decade as a coffee-table book. The series documents the relationship between architecture and open sky: cornices, rooflines, spires, window arrays — the vertical interruptions the built city makes against the field above. The monochrome treatment is not incidental; stripped of colour, the photographs isolate geometry and tone, making each frame a question about light and form. Bacchi is based in Palm Springs, where the sky exerts a specific pressure on the low desert landscape, but the project travels because the upward gaze is a universal metropolitan condition. New York’s Chrysler Building and the boulevards of Budapest offer radically different building morphology; Bacchi’s consistency of approach — phone up, always black and white, always the sky — holds them together.

Baroque Medusa Media’s entry into photography publishing with this title is its first venture in the form. The press has built its identity around surreal and dark visual culture through its sister platform Abstract Distortions; IN THE SKY represents a shift toward sober, documentary practice. The decision to launch with a photographer who works exclusively with a phone stakes a position in a long-running argument about where mobile photography stands in relation to the medium’s fine-art traditions. That argument has been settling, unevenly, in favour of the phone for some years. A book makes the case in the most durable form available.

What a photography book does that a feed cannot is accumulate. A decade of work held in print, sequenced and considered, is a different object from the same images encountered one at a time. IN THE SKY will face the test every photography book faces: whether a consistent formal approach, applied long enough, becomes a proposition about seeing. Bacchi’s premise — that modern cities photographed always from below, always in black and white, resolve into a shared condition of light and geometry — is legible in a single image. Whether it earns a book is the question IN THE SKY will answer.

Baroque Medusa Media has not announced a release date or retail price for IN THE SKY.

Tags: Baroque Medusa Media, IN THE SKY, James Bacchi, iPhoneography, mobile photography books, urban architecture photography