Millions of people around the world, while travelling, take the same pictures from the same spot with the same angle. Is it because we are already influenced by the images we’ve seen before in travel guides, booklets, internet and friends’ albums? Is the known image a prove of a trip to us or are we just trying to reproduce an image of an image? Swiss photographer Corinne Vionnet gathered a great number of tourists’ shots using keywords searches and online albums for her series Photo Opportunities.
Each of her pictures consists of about a hundred overlayed similar images and it takes the author about a week to complete the final shot. To reach the magnificent illusion of a painting, Vionett brings all the snapshots together in transparency layers, and only a segment of the image that she finds the most significant is used as a meeting point for all the pictures of a certain place. The artist grabs our attention to the fact that even being a tourist that’s visiting a location for the first time our mind is already manipulated by someone else’s experience. Do we need to be different during our journeys or is it enough to claim “I’ve been there too”?
