Surreal Photography By Erik Johansson

Swedish photographer Erik Johansson creates amazing surreal photos. He was born in 1985 outside a small town called Götene in the middle of Sweden. He grew up on a farm with his parents and two younger sisters and he liked drawing. Probably because of his grandmother who was a painter. Early he also got interested in computers, escaping to other worlds in computer games. At the age of 15 he got his first digital camera which opened up a new world for him. He said: "Being used to drawing it felt quite strange to be done after capturing a photo, it wasn’t the process of creating something in the same way. Having an interest in computers made it a quite natural step to start playing around with the photos and creating something that you couldn’t capture with the camera. It was a great way of learning, learning by trying. But I didn’t considered it as a profession until years later."
In 2005 he moved to Gothenburg to study Computer engineering at Chalmers University of Technology. During studying he took up his interest for retouching again. He had a lot of ideas that he wanted to realize while trying to make them as realistic as possible. After publishing some of his images online he started to get requests about commissioned work from some local advertisement agencies. He started freelancing in parallel with his studies while still working on personal projects. He got more and more jobs and at the time he finished his studies with a master in Interaction Design he wanted to try out the photography path. He moved to Norrköping in the eastern part of Sweden to start working full time as a freelance. He worked on interesting projects, both local and abroad. In 2012 he moved to Berlin, Germany.