My partner, Seth, grew up entwined in something of a family-wide fascination with miniature train sets. We traveled a bit with his parents last winter, and they even made sure we stopped at the Colorado Model Train Museum. It was less of a museum in the traditional sense, and more of a large, singular room featuring a gigantic, elaborate, sprawling train set— its proportions both miniature and enormous simultaneously.

We loomed like giants over the massive/miniature diorama with all its intricate details and moving parts, looking down on so many different frozen scenarios and disparate landscapes from above. Our perspective was voyeuristic and godlike, and I truly believe that is a fundamental part of the appeal here: the fact that these miniature train sets allow you to view the world from an extraordinary and otherwise unattainable perspective.

Fast forward many months, and I’m in Nevşehir, Turkey, photographing the Ortahisar Castle of Cappadocia (pictured above).

This ancient city splays itself out before you— at once both sprawlingly massive but also seemingly miniature in scale— and as I loomed over it from above, I realized I was experiencing the same surreal exhilaration I felt with the miniature trains.

This was real life, and yet my perspective was so unfamiliar that my brain struggled to make sense of what I was seeing and the city’s relative proportions.

Hopefully I can communicate a bit of this magical bewilderment in my collection of photographs.

And if things weren’t already surreal enough, a nearby child (who had clearly grown tired of merely FEEDING the pigeons), decided it would be fun to antagonize and excite the birds instead— at which point, they all became frenzied and started flying directly at my camera lens like a horror film. 😂😂😂

Yikes! I guess I’m done shooting for today! 😝🤪