Playing with surrealism: pushing the boundaries of reality

Flamingo

Reimagining reality

There’s something deeply satisfying about breaking the rules of photography and for me multiple exposure is the perfect playground for that kind of game. It’s where I stop worrying about being faithful to reality. Who said a photograph has to strictly represent what is happening in front of the lens?

When I shoot multiple exposures I’m not just layering images, I’m playing with the reality around me. It’s a way of bending it, reshaping it, inventing something that never existed but feels familiar, or that was living just in your head. If, like me, you love surrealism, this is where you can really put it into practice. You can take what looks ordinary and push it just far enough to make it dreamlike.

It’s not only about technique but also about attitude. You have to enjoy the deception. With multiple exposure I discovered that I can turn a boring street corner into a maze or make a puddle look like a gateway to another world. And yes sometimes everything collapses into a big mess but that’s the fun of it. It’s like flirting with disorder and somehow making it poetic.

The Flamingo with Two Heads

Flamingo 2

One of my favorite photo stories began almost by accident, as these things often do. I was in Kowloon Park, not even planning to shoot. I had just come back from a hike with some friends, camera still in my backpack, since I didn’t pull it out before (yeah, I’m a terrible landscape photographer!). There’s a large pond in the park filled with white, elegant flamingos. We stopped to watch them for a while and that’s when it happened: I pulled out the camera, switched to multiple exposure mode (two shots, “Average” mode) and started shooting.In the first frame, a flamingo had his head raised; in the next, just milliseconds later, he bent gracefully toward the water to drink. The result was pure surrealism: a two-headed flamingo, impossibly balanced between two moments in time. By luck, its body and legs didn’t move at all, so only the neck shifted, creating a perfect illusion born from a fraction of a second.

Excited, I tried again. Same bird, same setting, this time the head tilted to the left (yes, he didn’t move for quite a while luckily). Then a third attempt: two flamingos together this time, but this time for the second shot I rotated the camera 90°. The result? A pair of headless flamingos forming a strange, geometric dance, absurd, dreamlike and quietly beautiful.When I got home, I realized these three vertical shots worked perfectly together, like a triptych.

Even years later, they remain some of my favorites. They remind me that sometimes the best photographs happen when you stop trying, when you let chance, timing and curiosity take control.

Because in moments like that reality stops pretending to be stable and that’s exactly when it gets interesting.

Flamingoswirl

The impossible made visible

That’s what I love about photography and using your creativity: it gives you the tools to create the impossible.

So next time you’re out shooting, don’t just capture what’s in front of you. Layer it with what’s underneath or what’s in your head and let accidents happen, blur, merge, disguise.

Reality doesn’t need another photograph, but your imagination: what makes an image stay in your mind is not how accurate it is, but how strange it dares to be.

And you? Have you ever used your camera to play with reality, to give shape to something that only lived in your head?