Curiosities,Home & DesignNOV 30, 2021

40 Surreal Photos That Will Make You Feel Uneasy For Unknown Reasons

Akvile Petraityte 🇺🇦, Jonas Grinevičius and Austėja Akavickaitė

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There’s something very off about these empty places. We can feel it in our bones. The hairs on the back of our necks are standing on end and our guts are telling us someone’s watching us, lurking in the shadows, just out of sight. Can you feel it too, Pandas? The eeriness? The tension? The low-key anxiety? We hope it’s not just us.

Liminal spaces exist as thresholds between one place and the next. They are the ‘in-between’ spaces like empty streets, waiting rooms, hallways, stairwells, parking lots, and airports that mark a transition between your starting point and your destination. Often, they make us feel uneasy. Unsettled. Even fearful. Especially when captured through the lens of a savvy photographer. Bored Panda has curated this list of exquisite, dreamlike, liminal weirdness to share with you how bizarre some parts of our world, near and far, really are when there’s nobody but us around.

Photographer Dominic Sberna, from the United States, was kind enough to answer Bored Panda's questions about the role that lighting plays in setting the mood and tone of photos. Scroll down for the interview.

Are you ready to step across the threshold into the land where nightmares and reality mix like waves in a storm? Stay close, don’t wander off, don’t get lost, and let’s go explore. Oh, but if you do find your way back safe and sound, you might want to take a dive into our previous article about liminality right here.

#21 Photo I Took Of A Quiet Street At Night

Maxsposure

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Meanwhile, tabletop RPG designer and software engineer Rob Justice opened up to Bored Panda that he’s been a fan of liminal spaces, or “the space between spaces” as he calls them, even before he’d heard of the term.

“I was looking through old pictures on my phone and realized I'd taken a few liminal space pictures myself over the years. Just places that felt unique or odd to me. It's always weird to realize you're a fan of something before you know what it is,” he said.

#22 Beach Walk To Nowhere

interstellarpolice

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#23 Marienplatz U-Bahn Station

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#24 I Feel Like I Really Want To Be There

whiskeysplotches

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In Rob’s opinion, transitionary places have a “strangely powerful” effect on the human psyche. “The feeling of being between two places is an uncanny feeling, whether it's literal or psychological,” he said.

“It's stressful but there is something comforting knowing that it's temporary,” he said about transitions from two points. “I think that's where people find themselves drawn to liminal pictures. It's temporary places made permanent."