Imagine a world where elephants, sloths, and gorillas are as common city sights as buses, pedestrians, and drunken frat boys. That's the world Lithuanian-born street photographer Ceslovas Cesnakevicius concocts in his new series, The Zoo. His penchant for surrealism, evident in the Magritte-like photo manipulations we showed you last year, shines through the gritty black-and-white photos of London, Paris, and Berlin captured while on vacation.
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Impressed by the diversity he experienced in these cities compared to that of his homeland, he thought, "A hairy beast walking down the street wouldn't bother anybody, as long as it minded its own business." That was the conceptual seed for The Zoo, an idea he came to treasure. "I was born and raised in Lithuania, a former republic of the now nonexistent Soviet Union," he tells The Creators Project. "In my country, everybody standing out of the grey mass was legally bullied or even persecuted by the state." For Cesnakevicius, The Zoo isn't just about composing a fun, surreal scene, but about how nice it is when we all get along.Check out selects from the series below:
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