[Video: surrealist photographer and “photo-composite artist” Erik Johannson introduces a TED audience to his work. In this brief talk, he doesn’t address so much how his images come about, as why they do. But he’s not shy about revealing his secrets, either; he may take several, dozens of, even hundreds of carefully planned and lighted photographs, and then spend hours or even months snipping away at and reassembling them — their edges veeeery subtly removed or obscured — into landscapes which could never exist, but surely look as though they could. Coverage of his work and interviews with him are scattered here and there around the Web (e.g.), and he’s got his own YouTube channel of “behind the scenes” videos. Very clever and exhaustively but lovingly detailed work.]

From whiskey river:

The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself…

There may be a broken trail of stone and bone faintly suggesting the development of the human body. There is nothing even faintly suggesting such a development of this human mind. It was not and it was; we know not in what instant or in what infinity of years. Something happened; and it has all the appearance of a transaction outside of time.

(G. K. Chesterton [source])

…and:

Although at first glance there may appear to be a fairly thin line between them, there are significant differences between the attempt to somehow magically exert one’s will on tangible reality for one’s own benefit (manifestation), and the inspiration to imagine entirely new realities (sometimes to add color and bounce to the drab waltz of existence, sometimes to facilitate the recognition of wonder, sometimes just for the hell of it); between an attempt to mentally force fortune to alter its course for one’s personal gain (to manifest, say, a winning lottery ticket), and possessing the lightness of spirit and the freedom of mind to live as if such developments would pale in comparison to those one regularly experiences at the piano, the easel, the writing pad, or upon viewing a pattern of fallen leaves in the gutter; to live — against all evidence — as if advances in fortune were already here.

(Tom Robbins [source])

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