Shortly after Andreas Gursky's landscape photograph, Rhein II, sold off at an outrageous $4.3 million at an auction, two Switzerland-based photographers Jojakim Cortis and Adrian Sonderegger decided to have a little fun by recreating the photograph completely inside their studio. “It started out as a joke,” Cortis tells Wired. “In our free time, when there’s no money coming in, we decided to try to recreate the most expensive pictures in the world.”

Initially they had decided to recreate only the most expensive photographs, but soon they realized the technical difficulties of it. For instance, creating a model of a human wasn’t easy. So instead, they settled on recreating iconic photos that embody the great events of the past two hundred years.