With a mission to show how hypermodernity affects the relationship between nature and artifice, photographer Ryan Koopmans set about shooting developing cities to, as he puts it, “produce a metaphorical, surreal, decontextualized and subjective visual anthropology of a growing global condition.” The result is striking images of various environments and situations that serve as a bridge between the present and the future. In his photographs, offshore wind turbines dot the North Sea, cars and people are captured from high above through the spherical glass floor of the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai and enormous tree-like structures act as new homes for plant life along Singapore’s manmade marina. Although his large-scale images are from different times and places, Koopmans says they all “relate to one another by way of shared threads of thought.”

This portfolio originally appeared in Document’s Fall/Winter 2013.