Surreal photography makes familiar subjects feel dreamlike, strange, or impossible. A person might become smaller than a flower, a landscape might fold upwards, or a doorway might open onto another world. You can create these effects with camera techniques, staged scenes, or photo editing.
These 14 ideas show different ways to approach surreal photography, with examples from the artists credited below. Use them to choose a visual idea, then plan how to photograph it.
What is Surreal Photography?
Surreal photography brings the logic of dreams into a photograph. It often keeps recognisable subjects but changes their scale, setting, appearance, or relationship to one another. The result can be playful, unsettling, or quietly mysterious.
The historical movement took shape with André Breton’s 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism. Photographers such as Man Ray and Lee Miller helped explore its possibilities. Double exposures, montage, distortion, and darkroom experiments allowed photographers to go beyond recording what was in front of the lens.
You can still work in-camera with techniques such as double exposure, or combine photographs using post-production editing techniques. Editing is one route, but framing, props, reflections, and movement can also make an ordinary scene feel strange.
An unusual subject alone does not automatically make a photograph surreal. Think about the effect you want: a familiar object behaving unexpectedly, a missing piece of a scene, or a space whose scale no longer makes sense.
© Anna Maghradze
14 Surreal Photography Ideas to Inspire You
Each example below offers a different starting point. Some rely on an unusual real scene; others change reality through staging or editing.
1. Go Under Water For Dreamlike Portraits
The underwater world can make an ordinary portrait look like a dream. Floating hair and fabric change a person’s outline, while a frame without the surface or pool edge removes familiar clues about where they are.
In this example by Velizar Ivanov, the subject appears suspended in the water. Her gaze gives the viewer something steady to focus on within the floating shapes. That balance between a recognisable face and an unfamiliar setting is what makes these underwater portraits feel surreal.
Plan the pose and background before entering the water. Underwater portrait sessions need appropriate skills, supervision, and equipment. For a dry-land starting point, photograph a subject lying on a plain background with their hair spread out, then turn the final image to change its apparent orientation.
© Velizar Ivanov
2. Find Surreal Landscapes Beneath The Waves
From Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea to The Abyss, the world beneath the waves has been a source of intrigue and inspiration for many artists.
An underwater scene can feel unfamiliar without being digitally altered. In the photograph below, the school of fish surrounds a diver and fills the frame. The repeated shapes and the small human figure make the scene feel like another world.
The work of Alexandra Rose shows how an underwater photographer can find that effect in a real environment. For your own compositions, look for repeated shapes and a subject that gives them scale. Keep your distance from wildlife and work within your diving ability.
© Alexandra Rose
3. Remove Faces for Surreal Portraits
A hidden or missing face leaves the viewer searching for an identity. You can create this uncertainty with a turned head, a carefully placed object, or a composite in which part of the person disappears.
In the example by Anna Maghradze, the missing face interrupts an otherwise familiar mirror scene. These surreal portraits invite a reading of absence or isolation without needing to explain a character’s whole story. The same idea can form the basis of photo collages.
To try a disappearing effect, put the camera on a tripod and photograph the scene both with and without your subject. Place the frames on separate layers and use a layer mask to reveal the empty background where part of the subject would be. Keep the camera and lighting fixed between frames.
© Anna Maghradze
4. Play With Your Food for Surreal Food Photography
Food photography often invites us to imagine how something tastes. A surreal food photograph can interrupt that expectation with an unexpected colour, surface, or setting.
The black apple in Elijah O’Donnell’s photograph still has a familiar shape. Its dark exterior and pale cut surface create the surprise. That contrast can suggest unease or artificiality.
Start with a food item whose outline is easy to recognise. Photograph it against a plain background, then change one property in your edit, such as its colour or apparent size. Leave enough familiar detail for the viewer to recognise what has changed.
© Elijah O’Donnell
5. Explore Character Depth with Blacklight Photography
Blacklight photography can give a portrait an unfamiliar colour palette. Bright patterns against a dark background draw attention to selected parts of the face or body.
In this example by Danilo Batista, the glowing markings become the subject’s most striking feature. The patterns suggest a mask or an imagined character.
Build your composition around a simple pattern and a dark background. Make a test exposure to see which details remain visible. Follow the instructions for the light and any makeup you use, including where the makeup may be applied.
© Danilo Batista
6. Resize and Relocate Familiar Objects
Changing the size of one object can change the whole story. A moon small enough to carry becomes a possession; a tiny everyday object made enormous can become an obstacle.
Anya Anti uses this kind of unexpected scale to create photographic fairy tales. In the example below, the moon is bound with a chain and brought down to the figure’s feet. The impossible relationship is easy to understand because the individual elements remain recognisable.
Sketch your scene with just two main elements before you shoot. For a composite, photograph each element with a matching light direction and camera angle. Add contact shadows where the objects appear to touch, so the changed scale feels part of one scene.
© Anya Anti
7. Resize Yourself to Explore New Worlds
Making yourself tiny turns a tabletop, garden, or kitchen into a new landscape. A cup can become a lookout, and a flower can become playground equipment.
Joel Robison is a self-portrait artist whose imaginative scenes often place him in that miniature world. His work is a way of telling stories, with himself as a character the viewer can follow.
For your own self-portraits, photograph an everyday object first. Then pose as though you are sitting, climbing, or leaning against it. Use image manipulation to combine the photographs. Match the direction of the light and the angle from which the camera looks at both subjects.
© Joel Robison
8. Change the World for a Warped Perspective
A familiar landscape becomes unsettling when the ground no longer behaves as expected. Roads, fields, and buildings give the viewer a sense of scale, which makes an impossible bend more surprising.
In the example by Aydin Buyuktas, the field appears to curve upwards until the distant ground faces the viewer. The repeated rows help carry the eye through the bend.
For a small editing exercise, start with your own photograph of a path or patterned field. Experiment on a duplicate layer with a warp transformation. Watch how the horizon and straight lines change. This is a way to explore the idea, not a reconstruction of Buyuktas’s production process.
© Aydin Buyuktas
9. Distort Vision with Motion Blur
Motion blur can turn a recognisable person into a shifting shape. You can add it in post-production, or record movement during the exposure with a slow shutter speed.
Start with the camera supported and ask your subject to move their head or hands. Try an exposure of around 1/4 second as an experiment, then adjust it after checking the result. The amount of blur depends on how far the subject moves during the exposure. Keep one element still if you want a point of reference.
Ryan Muirhead is a film photographer whose image below shows how blurred figures can feel eerie. That ambiguity can also work in the horror genre, where an indistinct person may be more unsettling than one we can see plainly.
© Ryan Muirhead
10. Experiment with Forced Perspective
Forced perspective changes the apparent relationship between subjects by placing them at different distances from the camera. A nearby hand can look large enough to hold a distant person or landmark when their outlines line up in the frame.
Try placing a small object close to the lens and your subject farther away. Move the camera until the two appear to touch. Check the edges through the camera, then choose an aperture and focus distance that keep both subjects recognisable.
The technique also appears in the Lord of The Rings films, where it helped make characters appear to be different sizes.
The image by Muhammed Ali Arslen below uses a playful relationship between a human figure and the moon. Let it inspire an alignment of your own, without assuming that the finished image reveals every step used to make it.
© Muhammed Ali Arslen
11. Remove Distractions for Surreal Minimalism
A scene with very little in it can feel as strange as an elaborate composite. When the horizon disappears and the background has few details, the viewer loses clues about distance and location.
In the photo below, Emile Seguin places a lone figure within a nearly blank white landscape. The figure gives the scene scale, while the lack of a visible boundary between land and sky creates uncertainty.
Look for a plain wall, an open area in mist, or another setting with little visual clutter. Give a single subject plenty of space in the frame. Keep enough detail to show the subject’s form rather than simply overexposing the whole photograph.
© Emile Seguin
12. Transform The Human Body for Surreal Subjects
Replacing part of the body with an object creates a visual metaphor. A cage, branch, flower, or empty space can suggest an emotion without spelling it out.
In Brooke Shaden’s image below, a birdcage occupies the torso. It can be read as a symbolic representation of confinement or vulnerability, while the absent torso makes the figure feel incomplete.
Choose an object for the feeling or idea you want to explore. Photograph the person and object from compatible angles, then combine them with masks. Keep some of the body’s outline visible so the replacement has a recognisable relationship to it.
© Brooke Shaden
13. Tear Down the Fabric of Reality
Treating a landscape like stage scenery creates another kind of impossible scene. A cloud might lift like a curtain, or a strip of ground might peel back to reveal a different place.
In the example by Platon Yurich, a figure appears to lift the sky. An ordinary gesture becomes strange because it changes something that would normally be far beyond the person’s reach.
To develop your own version, photograph a hand lifting a piece of fabric. Use that gesture as the starting point for a composite with a sky or landscape you photographed. Match the light on the hand to the scene, and decide what the lifted surface will reveal.
© Platon Yurich
14. Create Portals to Other Worlds
A portal connects two places that could not normally share the same frame. A door opening onto the sea or a window looking into space gives the viewer a route through an impossible world.
This is where surreal photography can overlap with fantasy. In Charlie Davoli’s example below, the opening interrupts the scene and suggests a destination beyond it.
Start with a doorway, window, or freestanding frame. Photograph the opening, then place a second image behind it using a mask. Match the viewing angle and use the frame’s edges to define the boundary. Decide whether the portal should look inviting, threatening, or simply puzzling.
© Charlie Davoli
Conclusion
Choose one change to ordinary reality and build your photograph around it. You might hide a face, alter an object’s scale, blur a moving figure, or make a doorway lead somewhere unexpected.
Start with a sketch and the photographs you need for that idea. If you combine images, check the light, viewpoint, edges, and shadows before you finish. The scene can be impossible while its parts still feel as though they belong together.
Learn how to construct Fantastic Photo Adventures for your own adventure into surreal photography with our eBook from Joel Robison!