Saint Basil's Cathedral, Moscow
Is anyone sick of seeing the same photographs of the worlds great monuments, the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids of Giza, the former World Trade Centre in New York? If the answer is yes, then I'd like to point you in the direction of Switzerland-based artist
Corinne Vionnet, which I came about on a blog post at
My Modern Metropolis.
Vionnet plays with the idea that we all go to the same places and take the same photographs, and that world has become a microcosm where few experiences are left as unique or untouched by globalisation.
Louvre Pyramid, Paris
While the images that Vionnet produces may appear, at first, to be blurred versions of photographs taken at famous places, that's not the case. The artist spent a fair amount of time raking through the image archives and sharing sites of the internet, scooping up images of famous landmarks around the world. She then layers hundreds of these photographs one on top of the other to reproduce hundreds of views of the same place, all in one photograph.
The photographs not only demonstrate how over-saturated we are with repetitive imagery but they act as a document of the passage of time around moments captured by hundreds of people across the globe. The project becomes a demonstration of collective memory and the ubiquity, and democratisation of photography as a means of capturing the world around us.
The Taj Mahal, India