Take Only Pictures
By:
September 10, 2012
The latest entry in the Everything/All The Time category is Photo Opportunities, a series of meta-photographs from Corinne Vionnet. Sourced from Flickr and other online photo-sharing sites, Vionnet collects snapshots of popular tourist attractions around the world, and combines, builds, meshes and layers them into one.
Have you suspected, even as you held up your own digital lens, that “everybody” has taken this same shot? You’d be right. And here they all are.
But the resulting pieces are not simple overlays. By choosing shots from a single (the most popular) perspective, and reducing the opacity of each so that the layers, or sense of layers, come through, the results are detailed, lovely, and oddly analogue. Perhaps this is what the stones thinks of us: a vague but everchanging blur, a mist of chatter and flash.
The almost-but-not-quite overlays give a virtual shimmer to the stone. There seems to be a core of persistence, although where exactly it begins and ends is indeterminate. Yet all the edges belong to us.
Read more:
Corinne Vionnet
Going to 11 (Vogue Magazine covers, and All of Billy Joel Played At Once)
All that is solid melts into air–or pixels.
Why would anyone want to do with a camera (which is built for accuracy and precision) what is better done with a paint brush? Why does anyone want to look at this? Wherein lies the pleasure?
I take your point o a degree Ann, but The precision and accuracy of the camera is quite dependent on where it’s pointed, by whom, by the acceibility of the technology, by its frame, by a moment in history, by technological assimilation, by it’s distribution, by its processing, by it’s lens, by it’s hitter speed, by a photograppher’s intentions and those myriad possibilities of interpretation held by any given spectator depending on his or her location within culture. So precision and accuracy can become a bit blurry on occasion if you squint your eyes a little bit.
I can’t comment on pleasure as this is outside both my expertise and experience.
Photography has the ability to take very accurate and precise images, but its technology also allows artists to push visual boundaries in new and unexpected ways. Both the documentary and artistic aspects have been present in the technology and the medium since the very beginning. A great older example is the Civil War photographer Matthew Brady moving dead bodies on the battlefield to make his news shots more dramatic. The brilliant thing about Vionnet’s work here is that she takes documentary-style photographs, and by simply combining them, highlights their artistic and impressionistic potential.
That said, what type of art anyone might like is of course subjective. To each his or her own!
These are amazing, Peggy — thanks for sharing, and for thinking about them. Fascinating.