The work of the Swiss artist, Corinne Vionnet, deals with the way we see famous landmarks around the world. First in her series, Photo Opportunities, was the Tower of Pisa, where she first noticed the enormous number of people all taking only slightly different versions of the same picture. By layering a hundred or so snapshots posted on the internet, she aimed to create a collective impression of how we see the site.

Less interested in photography than in number of images that floods our consciousness, she nonetheless achieves an appealing color photograph. Unfortunately, they are very similar to the work of the English photographer, Idris Kahn, who layered up commercial black and white photos of famous sites and art works. More intellectual in his approach, he described his work in an interview thus:

“I used 70 to 100 images for each picture. I wouldn’t necessarily take the whole image, but fragments of images, and bring them together on the computer. I would try to choose something that really stands out in the photograph. Roland Barthes called it the punctum. What I quite like about the whole process is that these landmarks are photographed a million times a day, but you can create more than just a document — a feeling of stretched time. I try to capture the essence of the building — something that’s been imprinted on someone’s mind, like a memory. ”  

Barbara Probst is a German photographer, who lives and works in New York and Munich, whose work is about an instant of time seen from different perspectives. Using as many as 12 cameras whose shutters are rigged to release at the same moment, she manages to demonstrate, in a very straightforward and fascinating way, the profoundly different way we individually see the world.  

topics: art