Photographer Christoffer Relander combines nature and human faces to create preternaturally beautiful portraits. The double and triple exposures blend aspects of the natural world and the grace of the human form.

More than a few artists have compared the grace of nature and the beauty of humanity, but Relander’s interpretations imagine a world in which we, the animals, are as delicate and fragile as nature.

Many of the artist’s portraits add an extra dimension to the humanity of the subject. There are others, however, that all but erase the human portion of the composition. Leaves, branches and blossoms take the part of skin, veins and muscles.

The truly amazing part of Relander’s work is that he doesn’t use Photoshop to create these masterpieces of multiple exposures. He creates them all in-camera using a Nikon DSLR.

His world-famous photo manipulations span the globe but this time with a twist: a single seemingly-unremarkable structure bent, broken, shattered, turned, twisted and reformed in dozens of ways.

Victor Enrich starts with an intentionally plain subject – an ordinary hotel in Munich, Germany – then begins to unravel it floor by floor, split it up the middle, peal it like an onion, inflate it like a balloon, flip it from side to side and much more. Essentially any adjective you can think of has been visually applied to deform this building.

Like an architect with an over-active imagination or impossibly-demanding client, he envisions seemingly endless configurations while variously (depending on the piece) respecting the overall material, language, volume and (/or) site of the subject structure. Each piece is in some way recognizable with reference to the original, even when it pushes the boundaries of physical possibility.

The resulting works can be viewed on his site and are summarized in the video shown here. Each is also available as a reasonably-priced print if from his website any grab your eye in particular, or grid editions (multiples on a single print) if you wish to frame your own sequence of deconstructions.

It would be entirely right and wrong at the same time to call this body of work realistic. On the one hand, the results look like pictures (which form the basis of these manipulations) – on the other hand, while not impossible, the reality they present is dramatically improbable.

This series by Robert Rickhoff is titled Out of Place and features all kinds of ordinary spaces and situations, from swing sets, crosswalks and roundabouts to railroad tracks, swimming pools and public bathrooms.

Yet in (almost) each case, there is something not quite right … or drastically wrong. It takes a little while to notice in each case, though, until you get the hang of it and start looking for the odd-man-out element right away.

Still, it is fun to imagine what would happen to people taking a speed-bump ramp, or encountering a raised crosswalk – certainly a surreal experience in reality, and at least something to trigger the urban imagination in photographic form.