Photographer Breaks Cities Down Into Simple, Hypnotic Colors And Shapes

Think about a city that you love. Why do you love it? Maybe because of the readily available public transportation. Or the delicious street food. Or that bartender you love who always says hello when you walk in the door.

Or, maybe it's something else, something harder to pin down. Something in the way that street and sky and buildings and sidewalks and everything in between come together to create the stage for where you live your life.

With his series "Chroma" and "Anti-Chroma," Melbourne-based photographer Ben Thomas set out to deconstruct the space of the city using color as his scalpel. The images in "Chroma" are the colors of ice cream buffets, Miami Beach and aquarium tanks. "Antichroma," on the other hand, delivers cool blues and muffled tones that feel like looking at the world through sunglasses, or underwater.

"My primary inspiration is my love of architecture and color," Thomas explained in an email to The Huffington Post, "which in turn has had me seek out architecture and place design that give cities their unique feel. I wanted to break these cities down to their most basic colors and shapes, an aesthetic that is illustrative and flat."

The resulting images, where the cool geometry of an Edward Hopper painting meets the saturated pop of a comic book page, turn immersive environments into razor-sharp illustrations, carefully filled with the shades and shadows that bring the spaces to life. As Thomas put it, "My hope is that people, after viewing the work, will feel the urge to go out and explore more deeply the architecture and design that surrounds them everyday."

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