With compelling attention to depth, detail and movement, French photographer Julien Douvier uses cinemagraphic techniques to capture everything from fleeting moments to frustrating routines that define life in bustling contemporary cities.

Working both in black-and-white as well as color, depending on what he is trying to depict, many of his works are simple loops of short time periods – typical cinemagraphs – but others go beyond that basic typology, too.

In his Routine series, for instance, individuals are looped but also overlaid in multiples within the frame, creating a sense of infinite or endless repetition – in other sets (examples shown below) he utilizes transparency, nature and reflections to enrich each frame.

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City Cinemagraphy Animated Photographs Of Urban Motion

You may have seen this amazing animation and thought it took an impossible amount of work to create, but there are multiple sites tools, and do-it-yourself tutorials that greatly simplify the process. This particular piece, which has been circulating the web, is a GIF from the music video below (scroll a few minutes in to see various examples).

Popular enough now to warrant its own definition and description, here is a summary of the trending phenomena: “Hyper-lapse photography [is] a technique combining time-lapse and sweeping camera movements typically focused on a point-of-interest.” Other names for this include: Walklapse, Spacelapse, Stop-Motion Time-lapse, Motion Timelapse and Moving Timelapse.

As for those wishing to follow suit and create something similar: the Google Street View Hyperlapse creator is by far the easiest online generator for these kinds of panoramic captures – you simply set start and end points as well as a point of focus then click a button. Be warned: experimentation with this tool may be habit-forming.

Per this tool’s creators, who have made their API-based work openly available on GitHub, “creating them [can] require precision and many hours stitching together photos taken from carefully mapped locations. We aimed at making the process simpler by using Google Street View as an aid, but quickly discovered that it could be used as the source material. It worked so well, we decided to design a very usable UI around our engine.”

For those who want to customize their work and take it to the next level, the video above walks creators through a more direct use of Google Maps, screen captures and more nuanced edits. While their approach presumes you have and know how to use a video editor (higher barrier to entry), they also go into more detail about how to pick the perfect shots. For instance, their video explains how to line them up and utilize motion blur effects in the foreground to enhance the visual experience – all techniques that can be applied in Photoshop or a similar program to GIFs as well as videos.

Finally, lest you think this is a brand-new fad, consider Devil’s Circuit from Takashi Ito, which took the same wraparound approach to buildings in 1988 – the big difference now is simply the accessibility and ease of tools with which anyone can make something of this kind.

At first glance, they are nearly believable, these angled buildings with their curious corners. Closer inspection reveals Escher-esque optical illusions and impossible intersections, liminal hybrids of real details … reconstructed.

Olivier Ratsi, a French visual artist, titles this series What You See is Not What You Get (WYSI*not*WYG). It collects then fragments urban landscapes, which he dubbs Anarchitecture, sorted by country and city, from around the world. The results are reassembled into something at once more disjointed yet (together) unified than the original constituent objects.

His final pieces are then printed and posted around towns and cities where one might normally find advertisements – a sort of subvertising campaign challenging people to stop, look and think about their urban environment.

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Building Fragments 20 Surreal Reconstructed Photographs

Like dreams while you are having them, these buildings make perfect sense subjectively and yet no sense objectively. They are seamlessly integrated, yet structurally surreal … and, like a dream when waking up: the details are hard to recall when you look away.

Jim Kazanjian searches through tens of thousands of photographs in search of the perfect bits and pieces for each otherworldly creation. Some of the results seem almost plausible, while others stretch the limits of gravity, structural integrity and even the imagination.

Per his artist statement at 23Sandy (where you can also buy prints): “Jim Kazanjian’s surreal landscapes offer phantasmagoric visions of a where-is-this world, defined by impossibly complex architecture and M.C.Escher-esque black-and-white graphics.”

“Inspired by the imaginary realms of cult author H.P. Lovecraft—whose wild, cosmic short stories set the mold for much of the 20th century’s best science fiction—Kazanjian’s aim is to redress the “misunderstanding that photography has a kind of built-in objectivity…to defamiliarize the familiar.”

One of the most common concepts for the future has long been the wheel-free automobile, even before it was popularized in Back to the Future – but always, these looked almost shockingly familiar to our everyday rides.

Renaud Marion is well established in the realm of realistic photo editing, splicing everything from architecture to wild animals into ordinary city street scenes and letting the strange juxtapositions speak for themselves.

In this new series, he simply (albeit carefully) edits out all trace of wheels from various vintage vehicles, resulting in surreal portraits of apparently-flying cars. Even the dingiest rusting old 70’s-era auto seems somehow wonderfully otherworldly after he is done.