My 22 Surreal Photo Edits That Offer A New Perspective For The Ordinary Things (New Pics)

Since a young age, I’ve had a fascination for all things art, subconscious, and illusionism. I enjoy remembering my dreams in the morning. I love magic shows, watching the impossible become possible, being tricked by optical illusions, being made to "look twice". I developed a passion for photography very early, probably due to seeing my parents with a camera all the time photographing me and my siblings. For my child's brain, a camera was a magical object!

During my history of art studies in the UK, I discovered the Surrealist movement, from which I acquired a new way of seeing the world. Artists who influenced me include René Magritte, Chema Madoz, and Rob Gonsalves. They made me realise the possibilities that art offers for playing around and inventing stories. I felt like my photos needed some kind of "magic". So I sought a way to combine my two passions – photography and surrealism – and the solution was digital collage (or "photomontage"). The turning point was when I came across the image editing software Adobe Photoshop. It was the perfect tool to express myself by merging my photos with my imagination!

A graphic designer friend of mine introduced Adobe Photoshop to me when I was in college. I fell in love with it straight away: finally, a way to merge my photos with my imagination! I’ve been self-teaching Photoshop for almost ten years now, and every day I learn new tricks. If you scroll down my Instagram feed, you will notice how my photo manipulation skills have evolved over time!

The creation process – merging the images on Photoshop and then retouching the colors on Lightroom – is relatively quick. Most of my photomontages take between 1 and 2 hours to put together. What takes time is to come up with new ideas, to ‘train’ my eyes to be able to find atypical connections between things that at first glance have nothing in common. That’s also what I mean by ‘making the ordinary extraordinary’. Everyday objects are so familiar that we tend to not think about them twice, we just use them for their function. It takes time and patience to find new purposes for the familiar, but the surprise on people’s faces is totally worth it!

My motto is to "make the ordinary extraordinary", which means to raise something to a new level of meaning. Everyday things are so familiar that we tend not to think twice about them. We no longer marvel much at our eyes and how they can see amazing things every day. The message I want to convey with my photomontages is that an object does not necessarily have only one function. And a very effective way to draw attention to something that has been taken for granted is to change the original function of that object.

My "bodyscapes" illustrate my fascination for the connection between the human body and nature. I perceive our bodies as landscapes: eyebrows are forests, tongues are winding paths, lips are delicate hills, backs are strong bridges, bellies are sandy beaches, etc. I am particularly obsessed with eyes because to me they are the most expressive part of our body. My photomontages with eyes often create direct eye contact with the observer, which is a powerful thing: you can make someone laugh, happy, fearful, sad, or angry just by the way you look at them. We also tend to search for human faces in things, it is a phenomenon called pareidolia. I find that thrilling!