Erik Johansson's optical illusion photographs will boggle your mind
Captivating but best not looked at with a headache
Swedish photographer Erik Johansson is seemingly on a mission to blow our minds with his captivating optical illusions.
Based in Berlin, he is also a skilled retoucher, which enables him to turn his ambitious ideas into logically surreal projects that look like real photographs.
Johansson will often use hundreds of different original images to make one picture with the help of digital alteration software Adobe Photoshop.
His interest in art began aged 15, inspired by his painter grandmother, and he soon began “playing around with photos and creating something you couldn’t capture with the camera” on a computer.
Erik Johansson's photographs
Show all 15“It was a great way of learning, learning by trying,” Johansson writes on his website, adding that he only began viewing photography as his profession years later.
“I had a lot of ideas that I wanted to realise and I saw it as problem-solving trying to make it as realistic as possible.”
Johansson cites his childhood in the Swedish countryside as a key inspiration for his work, along with famous artists such as Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and Jacek Yerka.
“It’s a lot about looking at the world from a different perspective,” he says, describing his style as “surreal ideas realised in a realistic way with a touch of humour”.
See more of Johansson’s work at erikjohanssonphoto.com.
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