Pretty much every kid loves playing with cardboard boxes. Taiwanese photographer and graphic designer Sydney Sie never stopped playing with them. Her series “Unexpectable Boxes” captures the essence of our childhood pretending in surprising and surreal photographs. In bold candy colors, her images reveal her subjects’ faces, fingers and feet peeking out of holes in artificial spaces built by Sie. It’s an optical illusion achieved by a very simple technique of colored papers and boards colored like boxes, which a model then stretches into. In her artist statement, Sie explains the significance of her boxes: “This hole is the only clue from inner and outside, where we see the world from ellipse to square… The mystery is when we want to get more but instead, they are getting far and far away. We follow the path to hide under hiding. Desire is not the end of story but also the necessary to struggle before having it.”
Spanish photographer AnaHell crafts disconcerting and absurd photos that play with the human form, using various parts of the body as the canvas to create cartoonish characters. The ongoing project Secret Friends mixes the surreal with a documentary-style approach to capturing spots across the world. Using conventions of travel photography, AnaHell sets out to subvert expectations by “quite literally bending reality and creating a new dimension in the midst of ordinary situations.”
Swedish-born, San Francisco-based photographer 