Combining photographs or everyday vernacular designs, artist Anastasia Savinova aims to illustrate patterns in built environments across major European cities as well as rural countrysides. Her Genius Loci (a play on Genus Loci, or: spirit of place) series illuminates the distinctive details and materials of each place she visits and, set against a regional backdrop of landscapes and waterways.

In some cases, it is colors that serve as unifying factors — in others: building materials and typologies. Each one manages to be at once a singular work of architecture and a montage of quintessential parts.

In a way, her pieces serve act like scrapbooks or memories, combining fragmented portions of travels to countries including Sweden, Germany and Italy. They capture those ineffable qualities usually too hard to fit into a single picture frame.

“In this project I am a flâneur, wandering around, inhaling the spirit of places and trying to visualize it,” she says of her work. “I travel, I observe and document. I take pictures, stare into the windows, watch everyday life – all this helps to build the feeling of the Place.

“Architecture and landscape are visual components of the integral image of the Place, at the same time, this image is inseparably linked with a mentality and a way of life.”

“A House on each collage is composed of many buildings, which are typical for a particular country or city, in their connection with the land and the spirit of the Place.”

Can you distill the architecture of a particular city down to an image of just a single building? Not effectively – unless you’re Sweden-based artist Anastasia Savinova, who scouts and photographs the most distinctive typologies of specific locations and then blends them into a single structure via paper collage. Entitled “Genuis Loci,” the series consists of monstrous, Frankenstein-like cobbled buildings packing in as much visual information as possible.

“Traveling around cities and countries, I take pictures of buildings, look into windows sneakily, go to local shops, flea markets and bars, watch everyday life – all this helps to build the feeling of the Place. This feeling becomes a foundation for a series of large-scale collages. The Integral Image emerges from visual information and a dozen of associations. While architecture and landscape are visual components of the integral image of the Place, at the same time, this image is inseparably linked with a mentality and a way of life.”

“It is saturated with ‘an incorporeal something.’ Ancient Romans called it ‘genus loci’ – the protective spirit of a place. In contemporary usage, ‘genus loci’ refers to a location’s distinctive atmosphere. A big house on each collage is composed of many buildings, which are typical for a particular country or city, in their connection with the land and the spirit of the place.”

Some almost look like they could be real structures, while the rest are pure fantasy, towering dozens or hundreds of feet into the air, sprouting forests from their roofs or balancing precariously on ladders. Can you guess from the images which countries are represented here? If you can’t figure it out, check out Savinova’s website for all the specifics.

Skiers land jumps on ice cream cones, construction equipment struggles to transport oversized hot dogs and jet-powered seagulls zoom through the sky in a series of surreal photographic collages by Stephen McMennamy. Creative director of the advertising agency BBDO, McMennamy takes original photos of everything from meatballs to hand grenades and puts them together in unexpected ways, calling the results ‘combophotos.’

Inspired by the plethora of talent and creativity that can be found on Instagram, the photographer set out to pair things you’d never imagine together. Rather than seamlessly blending the photos in Photoshop so they appear to be a single composition, McMennamy simply matches up the contours of each subject, leaving behind the demarcation lines.

This technique results in images that tell an entirely different story than each of the originals, turning what would be highly ordinary, stock-photo-type images into something else altogether. McMennamy’s curiosity was initially piqued by photo apps that let you layer photos into collage compositions, and then he tried connecting images for a more fluid effect.

“The whole thing is one big scavenger hunt,” says the artist. “Sometimes it’s as simple as playing with scale and other times there’s a more meaningful message being told, like the cigarettes and French fries image but for the most part it’s just visual fun, like a truck with skateboard wheels.”

Many of us have picked up old black and white photographs and wondered what their backstories are, but these artists take history into their own hands, altering the images to produce new narratives. In the following 40+ revised photographic histories, new elements are combined with the mysterious original images, giving them a sense of surreality that could then serve as the basis of an entire book if the creative chain were to continue.

Black-and-White to Colorfully Surreal by Jane Long

A figure in a found black-and-white photograph catches artist Jane Long’s eye and she begins to envision them in a new setting, giving them a story, making them somehow less anonymous. She digitally restores and colorizes each image and combines them with other photographs to create entirely new, surreal compositions. “I wanted people to see these figures as real people, more than just an old photograph. Adding color completely changes our perception of images.”

Library of Congress Images Get Horror Makeover by Jim Kazanjian

Historical photographs archived by the Library of Congress are a lot more interesting in the hands of digital artist Jim Kazanjian, who combines them in unexpected ways to create terrifying architectural creations straight out of a horror movie. “I’ve chosen photography as a medium because of the cultural misunderstanding that it has a sort of built-in objectivity. This allows me to set up a visual tension within the work, to make it resonate and lure the viewer further inside. My current series is inspired by the classic horror literature of H.P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood and similar authors.”

Crazy Hyper-Colored Collages by Eugenia Loli

These smash-ups of vividly colored vintage photographs juxtapose entirely unexpected elements, like gigantic children riding tortoises through a city park or a war plane dropping candy instead of bombs. “I start by finding a ‘base’ image, and then I sort of build around it. Sometimes I have a concrete idea of what I want to do, and sometimes I leave the images to fit together by themselves,” says artist Eugenia Loli. “Sometimes, after a lot of juxtaposing, the ‘base’ image might not even be a part of the final collage. Most of the time I try to ‘say’ something important via my art, but other times it’s just about doodling.”

Bizarre Details Painted Onto Photos by Colin Batty

Can you imagine what the original subjects of these photos would think if they saw artist Colin Batty’s alterations? They might be a tad disturbed to see their own heads on fire or replaced by gigantic eyeballs. The artist paints with acrylics directly onto cabinet cards from the early 1900s.

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Twisting History 40 Surreal Altered Vintage Photographs

Residents of cities like Tokyo, Havana and Los Angeles see their own faces blown up to monumental proportions and pasted onto all sorts of urban surfaces when photography, street art and architecture come together. These 31 images from artists working all over the world cover the humorous and the poignant, bringing photography to the most unexpected places.

2 Girls Building in Melbourne by Samantha Everton

A fine art image by Australian photographer Samantha Everton spans the entire facade of the ‘2 Girls Building’ in Melbourne by KUD Architects. The concrete of the building is printed with a wallpaper texture and where it cuts away, the photo (printed on glass) is revealed. The image becomes three dimensional in the form of the three-story lamp mounted to the outside of the structure, mimicking the one in the original photo.

Inside Out Project by JR in Tokyo

The most well-known street artist working with photographic imagery is JR, who creates collages of portraits of residents in each of the cities in which he works. Based in Paris, the artist pastes up gigantic images of faces on buildings, bridges, rooftops and trains all over the world and gets in his subjects’ faces with a 28mm lens to capture unguarded expressions. The work pictured here is part of the Inside Out Project, which welcomes people to submit their own black and white photographic portraits to be exhibited in their own communities.

Humorous Photographic Images by Mentalgassi

Trash cans mounted to poles become backpacks, ‘metal heads’ appear on domed recycling bins and faces appear to be squashed in windows as artist trio Mentalgassi bring their photographic imagery to the streets. The anonymous young Berlin artists met at school and became interested in how new media techniques could be applied to three-dimensional objects.

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Portrait Of A City 31 Photographic Street Art Murals