In ancient times, after their domestication by the Egyptians, cats may have saved many humans from starvation and disease, which might help explain why we still worship them to this day. Or maybe it’s because they’re the perfect combination of haughty, mischievous, playful, mysterious and affectionate. Or maybe it’s because they’re actually controlling us through parasites transmitted by their poop. Whatever the explanation, people tend to love cats, and when we’re not busy feeding, petting, entertaining and otherwise serving them, our reverence often takes the form of art and design.

Neko Sushi

Two of Japan’s favorite things come together as one in ‘Neko-Sushi,’ a series by the company Range & Nakimushi Peanuts placing a variety of cats atop rolls of sticky rice and wrapped in seaweed. Each one has its own particular ‘flavor,’ with funny improvised props meant to represent raw fish and sushi fixings. This photo series is available for sale as a series of postcards and posters.

Feline Faces Swapped With Their Owners

Swiss photographer Sebastian Magnani swaps the faces of humans with those of their cat friends in the series ‘Undercats,’ producing a series of funny images in which the cats are unusually well-coiffed and accessorized.

Cat Graffiti

Felines are a popular subject for Parisian street artist C215, who’s known for painting them on virtually any kind of urban surface, from walls to trash cans. Though he uses stencils, and often repeats the same designs, each one manages to feel like its own distinct personality thanks to the textures and colors of the surfaces.

Edible ‘Glass’ Cat Dessert

The Kinseiken Seika Company in Hokoto, Japan – which pioneered the transparent ‘miss Shingen mochi’ dessert made of mineral water and agar – delighted the internet with a cat version of its renowned delicacy. It’s an extraordinarily delicate dish, melting away in about 30 minutes.

Cardboard Landmark Cat Houses

Cats invade Russia’s Saint Basil’s Cathedral, the Taj Mahal, the White House, the Eiffel Tower, the Sphinx of Giza and other internationally renowned architectural monuments for Studio Poopy Cat’s ‘Landmark’ series. These intricate pet houses are made of cardboard and feature unexpected details, like a snack elevator inside the Eiffel Tower.

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Cats Cats Cats 20 Fun Feline Focused Works Of Art Design

Masterpieces from Greek antiquity through the nineteenth century are literally seen through a modern lens, remade into action figures or inserted into contemporary settings, in this collection of remixed classic art.From auto mechanics styled and posed like Caravaggio subjects to storm troopers as Flemish upperclassmen, these projects bring centuries-old aesthetics into the 21st century.

Auto Mechanics in Renaissance-Style Portraits by Freddy Fabris

Inspiration struck when photographer Freddy Fabris accompanied a friend into a cluttered auto shop, the mechanics and their tools seeming like the perfect subjects for Rembrandt and Renaissance-style portraits. The award-winning series mimics such masterpieces as Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper and Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam.

Classic Statue Action Figures

David, The Thinker and Venus de Milo come to life in the form of posable action figures so you can see these classic statues like you’ve never seen them before. The pre-sale for most of these figures has already ended, but ‘David’ is still available for roughly $40.

Classic Art Figures in Contemporary Settings

Angels and other subjects from classic paintings hang out in dive bars, subways and alleys in Alexey Kondakov’s series ‘Art History in Contemporary Life,’ including Hans Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’ and the otherworldly female figures of Bougereau.

Lego Tribute to Classic Art

Iconic works by Magritte, Vermeer and Van Eyck get the Lego treatment in a fun photographic series by Marco Pece.

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Classic Art In A Modern World 35 Masterpieces Reimagined

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

In an era of digital cameras, Photoshop and other high-tech photography and processing techniques, one photographer has gone just about as far in the other direction as possible. Michael Shindler of San Francisco has spent the past six years learning the wet-plate collodion process of photography, in which photos are exposed on a sheet of iron metal blackened by painting, lacquering or enameling.

Tintypes were first patented in 1856 and were very popular in the United States during the Civil War. Made by creating a direct positive on the dark iron, tintypes are technically negatives. Collodion processes can register microscopic detail, giving the resulting photographs a remarkably high-definition look.

Shindler not only mastered this nearly forgotten medium, but made it available to the general public. He opened the world’s only tintype portrait studio, called Photobooth, in San Francisco. In the past year, he has created tintype portraits of nearly 3,500 people and even a handful of pets and inanimate objects.

Says Shindler, “I prepare each tintype plate by hand and make a single exposure of each person (occasionally two, if I make a mistake). The tintype is processed immediately so the subject can walk out the door with it about 15 minutes later. Since each plate is a unique direct-positive, there is no negative and only one copy of the image exists. So, I scan them before I give them away. But this is something I very much like about tintypes: they are things, actual objects! And things are good.”

Sometimes it happens by mistake: you forget to wind the film forward on an analog camera, and capture a new image on top of a previous one. These happy accidents can often have a ghostly, mysterious feel to them, leading some photographers to intentionally create double or triple exposures for the artistic effects. These 33 examples of multiple-exposure photography recall the unpredictable qualities of film, when each image was an experiment and gazing at the developed results was like opening a present.

Florian Imgrund

(images via: inthoughts.de)

German photographer Florian Imgrund just started using an analog camera in summer 2010, but his mastery of subtle and evocative double-exposure effects seem to imply decades of experience. Imgrund combines portraits of people with nature scenes for contemplative imagery.

Cameron Russell

(images via: cameron russell)

Photographer Cameron Russell uses no computer trickery to achieve these otherworldly images with a vintage feel. With a lomo camera, which has a cheap plastic body and lens that causes unusual, uncontrollable camera effects like vignetting and light leaks, Russell achieves these very interesting results.

Vivek Jena

(images via: vivek jena)

This double exposure by Vivek Jena, entitled ‘Saturday Sun’, seems like an image out of a dream. With a landscape, a frosted window and what appears to be a group of children playing, it’s hard to determine exactly what is going on here.

Maxim Trudolubov

(images via: max_trudo)

Layered shots of buildings and trees in Moscow come together into an almost monochromatic image in this unedited, multiple-exposure, cross-processed shot by photographer Maxim Trudolubov.

Oliver Morris

(images via: lullabies to paralyze)

Photographer Oliver Morris certainly has an eye for lining up multiple shots just right, for images in which his subjects – typically women – seem to blend into or grow out of nature itself.

Dan Mountford

(images vía: dan mountford)

British photography student Dan Mountford has attracted quite a bit of well-deserved attention for stunning in-camera double exposures so expertly executed, some viewers can hardly believe that they’re not Photoshopped.

Andy Bettles

(images via: feature shoot)

Working primarily in still-life photography for companies like Sephora and the New York Times Style Magazine, Andy Bettles also finds the time for beautiful double-exposure photographs like these.

Andrew de Freitas

(images via: andrew de freitas)

Cityscapes and portraits combine into atmospheric works of art in these double-exposure images by photographer Andrew de Freitas.

Fontas Nicolas

(images via: f-nikko.com)

Most photographers working with multiple exposures tend to focus on portraits for the biggest impact, but Fontas Nicolas proves with these images that urban scenery can be just as intriguing.

Julie Wang

(images via: my modern met)

Despite her age – she’s a teenager – Julie Wang creates multiple-exposure images that have caught international attention. Wang often shoots self-portraits and works with quotes and typography as well.

Charles Bergquist

(images via: charles bergquist)

The ‘Double Vision’ series by photographer Charles Bergquist uses multiple exposures to combine disparate images into striking works of art.

Pakayla Biehn

(images via: you should take care)

These aren’t just beautiful examples of double-exposure photography – they’re actually paintings. Artist Pakayla Biehn was born with strabismus, an eye condition that gave her double-vision until it was corrected. Drawing inspiration from that time, Biehn merges images from various photographers and then projects the double-image onto a blank canvas to paint it.