Digital artist Erik Johansson goes his own road

If your video gets 25 million hits then you must have a secret sauce to success.

Go Your Own Road by Erik Johansson

If your video gets 25 million hits then you must have a secret sauce to success. In Sydney for the Adobe Make It conference yesterday, photographic artist Erik Johansson however couldn’t list the herbs and spices that brought fame to his 2013 bus stop video.

“We were hoping for 25,000 views in three days. It would have been great,” he told The Australian. “In three days we had 10 million views and in about a week it was 20 million.” Yesterday it was 25.1 million, about one million more than the current Australian population.

“It was just for marketing a small event in Stockholm, and the idea was to photoshop people in a bus stop waiting for a bus,” he said. Johansson and a photographer waited across the street and the photographer snapped their faces.

Johansson then distorted their appearance in Photoshop and displayed it in ad form next to the victims in the bus shelter.

But he has no definitive answer as to why the video is so popular. “The problem is there is no good formula. When you try to recreate something, it never becomes as good. It was very spontaneous and honest, the reactions of people were honest, I think that’s what made it successful.”

Johansson was keynote speaker at Make It, an annual event hosted by Adobe where invited presenters spruik the creative arts and Adobe shows off recent additions to Creative Cloud.

Highlights yesterday included a lively talk by Sydney illustration and typography expert Gemma O’Brien who began the craze of customised illustrated sick bags on Qantas flights.

Artist Kevin Dart explained how he forged a career including working with Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks despite being colour blind with a world divided into about six colours.

Adobe’s Julieanne Kost argued it was OK to recompose and totally distort photos as she showed off her impressively large collection of retouched Antarctica images. That might be OK for some but not for those who feel duped when a photo pretends to give an appearance of representing reality but is massively altered.

Leaving Home by Erik Johansson

In the case of the 31-year-old Johansson, his photos make no pretence to accurately reflect reality. Johansson in his speech revealed he used everyday ingredients such as flour and food colouring to create the distortions in images that are his signature branding.

In his keynote he spoke of fear: the fear of running out of ideas and losing inspiration, and the fear of projects that turn out to be too big.

Johansson said he found reality “a bit boring”. His goal was to challenge people to think and inspire them.

“I want to capture something impossible, but I do want it to look real. It’s important for people to relate to my images and feel that they are part of it.”

Johansson was gifted his first digital camera on his 15th birthday and developed a taste for altering images he snapped. The Swedish photographer has a background in engineering and computers as well as photography.

Johansson has been exhibiting six images in the Head On Photo Festival at the Sydney Lower Town Hall. He also has released a book of his images, Imagine.

Impact by Erik Johansson