Viewing this photo set, one might think that Robin Bartholick was born in the wrong century. In this world, men still wear homburgs and bowler hats. Women are still seen with petticoats and parasols. Circuses are still the greatest shows on earth.

His subjects seem about as grounded in old-fashioned reality as can be – until you notice that most of them are doing impossible things in unreal dreamscapes.

Bartholick's early-20th-century look, however, comes from cutting-edge, 21st-century technology, such as Photoshop and the Canon EOS-1Ds digital camera. Each photo is painstakingly assembled from several other images, manipulated digitally and then stitched together to create a believable tableau...