An almost superhuman sense of alertness, a lightning-fast trigger finger and the world’s luckiest timing come together in one photographer to produce amazing coincidental images that couldn’t be faked if you tried. Born in Barcelona and currently based in Oslo, Pau Buscató has a keen eye for his environment, watching and waiting until people, animals and objects in his surroundings come together in just the right way at just the right moment.

He his method and constantly shifting body of work ‘H-O-P-S-C-O-T-C-H,’ after the children’s game, referring to the practice of “choosing and framing a small portion of the everyday” to transform it into something else. Buscató says he prefers to take an intuitive approach to photography, specializing in ‘frozen moments’ that just happen to produce a playful result. The former engineer and architect moved to Norway for a job and then felt a pull in a new direction – a transformation that gave photography a central role in his life.

It’s no surprise that Buscató chooses big cities as his subjects of choice, since they have “more weirdness per square meter.” Places like London, Barcelona and New York City have so much going on, his creative process requires the ability to hone in on tiny scenes and tune out everything else that’s happening. Eschewing preconceived notions of what he might find and shoot, the photographer lets the eternal march of urban life guide his work.

“I feel almost as if I am another spectator,” Buscató writes on LensCulture. “There is a necessary dissociation between my intuition, which leads me to take a photo, and reason, which just follows along. But regardless of whether instinct or rationality is paramount, street photography has always required an immense amount of time—hard work and long hours collecting the small pieces of a puzzle in order to create a bigger picture that is still unclear to me. Is there, actually, a bigger picture?”

Athletes have arrived in Rio for the Olympics on a massive scale in the form of two monumental photographic installations supported by construction scaffolding, one looking like he’s about to back flip over an entire building. French artist JR brings his signature black-and-white style to the streets for a dramatic addition to his ‘Inside Out Project,’ a global series bringing real people and their personal stories to public spaces through art.

The athletes depicted aren’t household names – in fact, they’re not even Olympic athletes who will be physically present in Rio for the Games. The first, installed on the roof of a large residential complex, represents Mohamed Younes Idress of Sudan. “He lives and trains in Cologne, Germany,” says JR. “He missed out on the qualifications for the 2016 Rio Olympics but he is there some how.”

The second figure appears to be that of a diver about to leap into the adjacent ocean. This installation rises from a rocky jetty overlooking the water in the Barra neighborhood. JR says he’s been working on this new technique, with the images supported by metal beams, for almost a year.

We previously featured JR’s large-scale work of urban camouflage outside the Louvre in Paris, where a black-and-white photographic installation made the museum’s iconic 11,000-square-foot pyramid by I.M. Pei seem to disappear. Other ‘Inside Out Project’ installations have included massive paste-ups inside Paris’ Pantheon building as well as covering a mass area of the ground in New York City’s Times Square.

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

Profusions of white balloons seem to explode from the interiors of houses, squeeze through basketball hoops and hover between the trees in the forest like odd bulbous clouds in this series by artist Charles Pétillon. ‘Invasions’ gives these normally free-floating objects a life of their own with a swarm-like presence within architectural spaces and landscapes.

Each photograph depicts a particular metaphor, making a statement on various topics. ‘Family Memories,’ top, shows the white balloons “symbolizing childhood naivety,” while ‘Play Station 2’ aims to “question the viewer on the uses of games in all forms, their evolution and their influence in society.”

The forest scene, entitled ‘Mutation 2,’ mimics the molecular structure of DNA, placing it in a picturesque environment to symbolize the effect of humans on natural spaces, with our tendency to modify everything to our own uses.

‘Invasions’ brings the balloons to retrofuturistic architecture designed in the late ’70s and early ’80s to examine our visions of the future and how quickly they become obsolete. ‘CO2’ represents the scars we leave upon the world with our lust for objects like cars. The artist sees the balloons as a way to visualize each of these ways in which we thoughtlessly proliferate, invade or evolve.

Swirls and pillars of light hover in fields or against dark urban backdrops like phantom monuments, captured on camera in a way that just can’t be perceived by the human eye. UK-based artist Sola literally paints with light, his amorphous creations seeming to take on three dimensions for just a split second as if the light itself has gathered up a mass of its own.

Looking for an outlet for personal expression led Sola to professional photography, documenting the sports, bands and lifestyles that he was into. Eventually, though, he wanted something that would give him more control over the creative process.

“Then I found light painting. Quite by accident one night while shooting landscapes of the urban environment and instantly I knew it was what I’d been looking for. I like to keep things real. I shoot with digital cameras, yes, but I employ principles of analogue film technology – in that once I’ve made an image I don’t change it any more than I could in a darkroom and therefore what you see, is what I shoot.”

“I believe there’s a real magic to creating something wondrous that’s ‘real.’ Sure, there’s a place for post production in this world but on the whole, you won’t find any here. To the point that even if I am caught in the scene the image is thrown away. I aim to create images that allow the viewer to suspend their reality and simply enjoy the energy and mystery of the image.”

See lots of more Sola’s work, including collaborations with NIKE and other brands, at LightBombing.com.