Photography: Mark Lyon’s brilliant and bizarre backgrounds in unlikely places

My dentist likes to quote zen proverbs at me while he’s cleaning my teeth: there’s nothing quite as surreal as a haiku being cooed at you while you have a bright light aimed at your tonsils and your teeth shaken and scraped by metal tongs. These strange but oddly familiar photographs by Mark Lyon capture some of that weirdness associated with dentist related situations.

His intriguing series, entitled Landscapes for the People, documents public spaces where the walls are pasted with tacky landscape wallpaper, the kind of wallpaper that is the visual equivalent of muzak. The pictures end up being both weirdly calming, like the proverbs my dentist likes to recite, and subtly unpleasant, like the sensation of having your gums numbed. Incredible images of brilliant backgrounds in unlikely places, which contain components of both the real and surreal.