Black-and-white images and footage from the past, plucked from public domain collections, become absurd animations as moving elements are transposed on top of them in this series of images by artist Bill Domonkos. UFOs spin around a a curly-haired woman captured on film in the early 20th century, a running skeleton struggles to keep up with the camera on a blurry set of train tracks and television sets hover in Victorian living rooms. A fancy hairstyle becomes a journey into a forest, human eyes project beams of light and armless statues get prosthetics.

The fact that the moving additions are so suitably tailored to the original images is what makes the results so magical, not to mention their 3D appearance. Simultaneously funny and dark, the animations – which he presents in both GIF and video form – are each strange and unlikely in their own particular way, yet somehow still believable. Maybe that’s not too surprising, coming from a man who shot his own version of Valley of the Dolls as a child with a Super 8 camera.

“I view my work as a collision and recombination of ideas,” says Domonkos. “My process unfolds gradually and spontaneously – using found materials such as archive film footage, photographs, and the internet. I experiment by combining, altering, editing and reassembling using digital technology, special effects and animation to create a new kind of experience. I am interested in the poetics of time and space – to renew and transform materials, experiences and ideas. The extraordinary thing about cinema is its ability to suggest the ineffable – it is this elusive, dreamlike quality that informs my work.”

The filmmaker and computer animator is also the creator of an app called Stereopsis, collection of 40 3D stereo images and GIF animations that combine altered archive stereographs and 3D computer graphics. You can get a contraption called ‘Google Cardboard’ to enhance the effect. See more on his website and tumblr.

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

Photographs of Japan from the Meiji and Taisho Periods (1868-1926) have captivated viewers around the world since they were first circulated. One photographer in particular captured Japanese life so beautifully that his work has been seen by countless people all across the globe. Until very recently, though, his name was virtually unknown. Now we know that the prolific photographer’s name was T. Enami – or rather, that was his trade name. He was born Enami Nobukuni, and his work made a deep and far-reaching impact on photography.

Some of T. Enami’s most popular and memorable works were his stereograms: two nearly-identical 2D images taken from slightly different angles that, when viewed together through a stereograph, appear three-dimensional. Here they are animated to give the 3D effect, but all of the originals can be seen on Okinawa Soba’s Flickr collection.

Enami started his career as a traditional photographer, but later embraced the more “modern” stereoviews and lantern slides. Judging from his carefully staged stereograms, he approached his work with a great deal of attention to detail. The colors on these stereograms were all hand-painted, and the resulting product was sold around the world. Today, collectors treasure these exquisitely detailed antique images.

T. Enami ran a photography studio in Yokohama until his death in 1926. His work spanned a multitude of areas, including postcards, large-format prints, private portraits, glass transparencies, photo processing and print-making, and numerous commercial photography projects. His photographs have appeared several times in the pages of National Geographic, a true honor for any photographer. One of his half-stereoview images was even used on the cover of their 100th-anniversary book Odyssey: The Art of Photography at National Geographic.

Despite his monumental contributions to early Japanese photography, T. Enami’s identity was not widely known outside of Japan until around 2006, when his descendants shared information about him with biographers and collectors. He was the only photographer of his era known to work in all contemporary commercial and artistic formats, and it can be said that his work has been seen by more people than that of the more established “masters” of his time.

The appropriate credit is now being given to thousands of Enami photographs that were previously unattributed or simply attributed to the wrong photographer. Enami is now, finally, in his rightful place amongst the most influential early Japanese photographers. A detailed biography of T. Enami can be found at T-Enami.org, and even more of his animated stereograms can be found at Pink Tentacle.