In their photo series "Icons", Swiss-based artists Jojakim Cortis and Adrian Sonderegger mimic some of the most iconic photographs we've come to know. What once started out as a fun side project has evolved to something bigger and a book release in the next year.

In 2012, Swiss-based artists Jojakim Cortis and Adrian Sonderegger presented themselves with a challenge: to recreate some of the world's most iconic images in their studio. In a bit of self-deprecating irony, they decided to start with the world's most expensive photograph (at the time), Andreas Gursky's Rhein II. After all, the money wasn't coming in for their own work, but at least they could have some fun.

The positive feedback they received after the first image was enough: with this initial success, they decided to deepen the series. But they quickly realized they needed a new metric besides expense—many of the other images on the list were simply too hard to reproduce using the same methods. So they began trawling through books filled with history's most memorable photographs and picking out ones which caught their eye. Using optical tricks and painstaking artistry, the duo has faithfully reproduced dozens of history's most iconic moments, but each with a new perspective and gleam of creative rebellion.

Making of "Tiananmen" (by Stuart Franklin, 1989), 2013:

The original: