17 of the Most Surreal Photos You’ve Ever Seen

After months of working at a desk job, studying hard at university, or admirably taking to the exhausting task of raising children, it may seem surreal when you find yourself sand boarding Australia’s dunes with Dave Thelander, gazing at the Northern Lights in Norway with Øyvind Bertinussen, or dog sledding through Alaska with Bill Cotter. Guided tours from Greece to India can show you a surreally good time, and although paragliding through the Himalayas with Franck, canyoneering through Switzerland with Tristan, and scuba diving alongside white tip reef sharks in Hawaii with Sophie are unique, Parisian artist Philippe Ramette’s gravity-defying artwork epitomizes surreal.

Tour guides worldwide do a fine job of bringing the surreal to life with their adventurous trips but the 53-year-old Ramette takes surrealism to a whole new level with these gravity-defying photographs that are never retouched in Photoshop – what you see is what you get, no matter how strange it looks. The secret is hidden metal supports he calls “sculpture-structures” and various other tricks such as gelling his hair flat and turning the camera lens on its side. And while reading a newspaper underwater in work-attire does sound pretty darn fun, given the option, we at GuideAdvisor would rather spend our surreal times backcountry skiing in Kathmandu with Patrick OKeeffe, swimming with dolphins in New Zealand with Al Macdonald, or ziplining with Canadian guide Megan K. How about you? Fancy going on an out-of-this-world guided trip, or would you rather pretend to defy gravity alongside the talented Monsieur Ramette?

For the shot above Ramette stood on a balcony in Hong Kong harbour. A watertight tank served as an underwater float for the balcony and Ramette then secured his feet on supports, leaned back and clung to the wood. The camera lens was then turned on its side. During the initial attempt, he was doused by waves and had to swim to safety.