Sweet daydream: the striking and clever surrealist photography of Erik Johansson

February 19, 2021

Erik Johansson is a Swedish photographer and image retoucher based in Berlin, Germany. He works with both personal and custom projects. Among his biggest clients are Adobe, National Geographic, Google, and Microsoft.

His compositions are a stupendous clash between reality and fantasy, fused into images that take us to the world of dreams. He defines his projects not as a capturing of moments, but ideas. He simply goes around photographing situations and objects that might fit in the ideas that come to his mind. Each project is a great challenge for him, as it can contain hundreds of images combined into a single photo.

His work can be described as surreal world created by combining different photographs. Erik works on both personal and commissioned projects with exhibitions and clients all around the world. In contrast to traditional photography he doesn’t capture moments, he captures ideas with the help of his camera and imagination. The focus is on the story and the goal is to make it look as realistic as possible even if the scene itself contains impossible elements. In the end it all comes down to problem solving, finding a way to capture the impossible. To Erik it’s always important with a high level of realism in his work. He want’s the viewer to feel like they are part of the scene. Although his work consists of a lot of work in post-production and combining photogaphs he always tries to capture as much as possible in camera on location. It often means building props and using creative ways of planning the shoot.
Erik Johansson

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