French photographer Denis Darzacq is an acclaimed photojournalist (he won a World Press Photo award last year) who likes to work on artistic projects, as well.

In his latest series, Hyper, people seem to hover and glide, weightless, through surreal shopping scenes. The colors and poses are delightfully cartoon-like, yet they become all the more fascinating when you realize that there are no hidden wires or pulleys, nor any digital manipulation to the photographs. These are honest, undoctored photographs — albeit taken with high-speed film at a fraction of a fraction of a second. They depict real people, at real moments in real space.

Darzacq says:

For many years now, I have questioned the place of the individual in our societies in my photographic work. This is achieved through the use of artistic but also purely documentary photography.

In Hyper, this questioning is structured around a formal opposition: between the body and its surroundings, or between being and having.

All my photographs are the fruit of shared real-life experience. There is no digital manipulation. I asked young dancers and athletes to jump around, encouraged by the violence of their surroundings – hypermarkets – and movements inspired by mannerist painting: unreal, overacted and pointless.

I see these as movements of resistance to a consumerist world invading our lives more and more. But they are also simply an artistic proposition free of any social or political interpretation.