The New World: Artworks that look like photographs of 20th century buildings

An alcohol store calls itself 'The Liquor Swamp', a cinema advertises its main feature as 'The Man Who Lived Forever' and a chemist is aptly named 'The World of Drugs'. Welcome to The New World, an intriguing series by German creative duo Geebird & Bamby that revisits anonymous places of the 20th century and explores the American dream.

At first glance, you'd mistake these somewhat dark images of brutalist and modernist buildings to be photographs. However, each one has been manipulated to become something else. By using photorealism and graphic design to create each artwork, Geebird & Bamby are able to merge art, design, architecture, photography and cinema from the last century.

Otherwise known as Robert Achtel and Jens Bambauer, the artists began the project in 2009 following a road trip across America, taking architectural photographs of buildings in California, Florida and Nevada.

The duo explained: "Set in a time characterised by the conflict of Modernist and Postmodernist convictions, the freely designed buildings reflect the contrast of manmade ideals and the acceptance of life in chaos... It's shaped by an original set of rules, metrics and processes. This enables the revelation of eclectic utopias that, for better or worse, withhold the definition of a photograph."

Each image is available to buy from Geebird & Bamby's shop.

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