Max describes his work in three simple words: light, balance, stillness. That design-led instinct shapes his signature style by capturing the world in vertoramas, short for vertical panorama. Using this technique, the photographer stitches up to ten vertical frames into one beautiful image. But the impressive part? He shoots entirely by hand, even in rain and low light where most consider a tripod essential.
Max intentionally avoids crowds to keep his frames free of visual clutter, unless he deliberately includes a human figure to provide a sense of scale. Whether it's himself or a travel companion, this solitary presence grounds the space in a quiet stillness, revealing a side of iconic places that millions pass through daily without ever looking up.
When playing with light, he unconventionally seeks out artificial sources: fluorescent strips, station lighting, neon, and the ambient glow bouncing off a wet floor. As he shared with us: “I treat that as the subject rather than just illumination, which is why the palette is usually cold. I'm not correcting it to look natural; I'm leaning into it.”
This experimentation with light led him to spend a lot of time shooting exclusively in black-and-white, until he realized that color was essential to the full story. As he shared: “Colour turned out to be integral rather than a distraction, because the colours in a place were chosen by someone. The tiling in a station, the lighting somebody specified, the palette an architect settled on. Leave that out and you're showing only half of what the place is.”
All of these personal and stylistic choices turn everyday spaces into quiet studies in geometry, and as a result, give Max Vassiades a style that is unmistakably his own.
#15
It's still one of my favourites. Not all of them end that dramatically, mind you. Getting stopped or escorted out was a fairly regular occurrence, though being polite got me a long way. More often than not people would look at what I was shooting, appreciate it, and let me carry on."
