George Christakis

George Christakis is a Greek digital artist/photographer. He explains on his website that he creates his images using digital techniques, and that his work is either surreal, conceptual or 'just landscapes with a bit of craziness', Christakis also explains that a lot of his inspiration comes from music. His website can be seen by following this link.

Christakis' landscapes are what attracted me to his work, its so different to other photographers I have been looking at. A lot of his work is quite surreal and thats what caught my eye, especially as my current project will be looking into surrealism and surrounding genres. Some of the landscapes, at first glance, look quite ordinary, but looking closely you can see that some things just aren’t right, whether its the colours in the sky, the scale of objects in the environment, or just something out of place, theres always something that is amiss, creating that surreal feeling about them. This is what interested me about the work, because with my project I wanted to create something similar in some respects, landscapes that contained something out of place, an anomaly, something that catches your eye in passing that draws you in for a closer look.

Christakis' landscapes look too cinematic to be photography alone, you can see the digital work that has gone into them even in the more realistic images, again this is something i'm looking to incorporate in my images because photography alone won't create the images I'm looking to produce. There needs to be something that creates the surreal atmosphere and the cleanest way would be digital manipulation. I find Christakis's work to be quite inspiring, what he does he does well.

A few examples of his work can be seen below.

George Christakis

George Christakis

George Christakis

George Christakis

As shown in the few examples above, the images contain different degrees of surrealism. Some of the images are more subtle than others, some are blatantly digitally produced such as the floating island and plane in a desert. While others are more photographically orientated with playing with long exposure and composites to create that surreal atmosphere, these are the images I'm more interested in as they relate to the work I want to produce for this project.