Photo Opportunities

Artist Corinne Vionnet has created these beautiful pictures of landmarks around the world by superimposing hundreds of tourist-taken photographs together. The outcome are blurred, ethereal images that Vionnet says are, "intrinsically linked to the people who took these pictures." While she doesn't immediately choose to condemn the act of tourist photography (or, as Susan Sontag proposes, "photograph-trophies") -- a position I have no problem defending in our social networking-dependent culture -- she instead chooses to focus on the phenomena of collective memory related to picture taking.

More images after the jump.

The project was inspired by Vionnet after searching for several well-known landmarks and discovering that people -- consciously or subconsciously -- photograph these places in almost identical manners. Upon merging the hundreds of similarly-framed pictures, we begin to witness the subtleties and nuances that color the different tourists' experiences. In fact, they begin to coagulate into a collective, shared memory and experience. The montages contain fragments of people and time, encapsulating not just a collective history, but as David Crouch puts it, being a tourist:

Being a tourist involves all the senses in interplay; thought and memory merging with the momentary feelings of touch, our feet getting to know somewhere as much as our two eyes. Being a tourist merges with being ourselves, and is less about escape from everyday life than a mix of adventure, the feeling going-further that we may desire, and holding on to our identity so we do not lose ourselves.

You can see the rest of Photo Opportunities on Vionnet's website, here.

(via My Modern Met)