On a roll

A former competition gymnast, Sabina Spaldi is now capturing her extraordinary talent on camera - and just where you'd least expect it.

Sabina Spaldi is in flight. The 24-year-old gymnast and artist has a pet project to photograph herself in motion and, usually, upside down in some of the world's most frequently recorded cityscapes. We have viewed New York through a hundred different celebrity lenses; the streets, parks and landmarks of London, Paris, St Petersburg, too. But Spaldi offers a new perspective - literally - on these and other famous locations. By tumbling through the air in front of her auto-timer, she introduces herself into the frame as if she were some kind of a earth-bound human arrow. The result is an oddly beautiful collection of photographs, one which makes us look again at environments we think we already know.

The project (she stresses her motivation is fun first, art second) marks the confluence of three prevailing passions: gymnastics, photography and travel. Of Italian parentage, Spaldi lived in Rome until the age of 11 and in London thereafter, but attended German schools in both cities. She is effectively quadralingual. "Well, I'm trilingual perfect - Italian is my first language, then German, then English," she says. "But my French is pretty close. Then there's Spanish ... Taken together, I suppose that covers a lot of the world, except Russia and China."

Spaldi's gymnastic ability was honed for competition over a 17-year period. "As a child, I'd climb on anything and everything. One day, my mother caught me doing pirouettes and full turns on the edge of the bath tub, and decided she had to get me out of the house and into a gym club before I fell and hurt myself. I was five at the time, I think." Interrupted only by the family's move to England, Spaldi's subsequent training won her inclusion in Britain's B Squad for tumbling, and a reserve selection for the national team for four-piece (bars, beam, vault and floor) at the 1994 World Student Games in Japan. These days, she practises once a week for her own recreation.

Travel is clearly a major preoccupation in the Bethnal Green flat which Spaldi shares with her partner, photojournalist Sam Faulkner. The couple met at the University of London, where she read French and German (Faulkner confesses that, while printing up work for the student newspaper, he would leave the darkroom and watch as she practised in the gymnasium). A giant map of the world covers one wall of their shared home, and columns of guide books strain towards the ceiling. The room into which they welcome me has the transitory air of a departure lounge - open hold-alls testify to Faulkner having just returned from assignment in Los Angeles, while Spaldi is in countdown for a much-anticipated trip to the Great Wall of China.

There, she will simply set up her standard-issue Nikon and begin projecting herself into the air. "I just do it again and again until all 36 frames are used up, so it can be pretty exhausting," she says. "If I added together all the jumps I've done, it would run into millions. And every location has its different challenges. St Petersburg was just so cold, which made things difficult, both physically and with the camera. Then at the Brooklyn Bridge, it was the traffic - I was trying to block out all of the car noise to concentrate on hearing the auto-timer. And, elsewhere in New York, I did a shoot on the top of a building, which was pretty scary. It was a small space with no barriers around it. My father was horrified when he saw the pictures."

Spaldi began recording her upside-down world while spending the gap year of her degree course at the Ecole Speos in Paris. Observing the results, some observers imagined computer trickery or montage was involved. Not so. Within months, she was covering gym events for L'Equipe. "Being a gymnast helped enormously," she admits. "Just by noting where a competitor put a board or a mat, or how they swung on the bars, I could anticipate what move they would make next. It might take another photographer 10 years to develop that."

Now, she is balancing the need to earn a living with a commitment to her pictures, and the book and exhibition they might make. Funding permitting, there are still many locations to visit and, I wonder, how much time? "I haven't got my whole life to do this, it's true," Spaldi smiles. "But there's still a few years left. I don't see any reason why I can't keep taking pictures like this up until ... oh, until I'm 50"