Photo Opportunities // corinne vionnet
--> Interview for Yvi Magazine by Welmer Keesmaat
--> Photographs, experiences and memories, by David Crouch
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Yvi Magazine
#2, Consumption, 2008 -- www.yvimag.com
Interview by Welmer Keesmaat
Corinne Vionnet created a series of photographic works, entitled Photo Opportunities, from hundreds of snapshots of tourist locations, which she found on the internet.
A conversation with the artist.
Q: How did you get the idea for Photo Opportunities?
A: This idea came from a trip with my husband to Pisa. He was going there for his work and we decided to stay over the weekend.
My photographic work is increasingly aimed at exploring signs of sociological behaviour in society, looking at the representation and memory of spaces. Also, I am interested in understanding the complex association between tourism and visual culture. So I was pleased to be able to see this well-known symbol, which I had in fact seen when I was a child, and observe my own reaction and the reactions of other tourists in front this famous tower. Due to the unique way it leans, the Tower of Pisa can only be photographed from two specific vantage points. One does not have enough space to get the entire tower in the picture, so there is really only one spot from which these pictures can be taken.
Once facing the Tower of Pisa, I observed tourists taking their souvenir pictures. I have done some rough calculations on how many photographs are taken of the tower per day, per month and per year. It is an impressive number! This phenomenon existed before digital cameras. But now, with digital cameras and the Internet, everyone can easily show their pictures to friends and other visitors by placing their images on an online photo-sharing website.
Once back home, I checked to see what I could find on the image search engines, using the simple keywords “pisa” or “leaning tower”, and hundreds of Leaning Towers passed before my eyes. I was sincerely impressed and became very enthusiastic. I then looked for other monuments and symbolic places, and this is how this work began.
Q: Can you tell me about the process of producing the series? How did you collect the images and how did you process them?
A: The idea took some time. I had the motivation and the material, but I didn’t yet know how to express what I wanted with this multitude of similar images. I am cautious about manipulating images. I also wanted this work to have a link to classic painting and etching, as they too have contributed to our knowledge of landscape and monuments.
For each place, I collected between 200 and 300 similar images, first through search engines and then on photo-sharing websites. The search was based on single keywords for the monument name and/or location. From there, I used hundreds of photos with transparent effects to obtain this final result. For each image, only a part of the monument is chosen to link the hundreds of images – usually a segment that I find important or where there is the greatest similarity amongst the photographs. Taking the example of the Forbidden City in Beijing, the portrait of Mao is used as a meeting point for all the photographs. As for the rest of the image: come what may!
Q: Do you feel that you have created new works of your own, or do you feel you have collaborated with the people who took the snapshots?
A: This work is intrinsically linked to the people who took these pictures. The collaboration is obvious, but it is without their knowledge. These pictures are on the Internet, to be seen by any eventual visitors. I am just one of those visitors. It is the sheer quantity of these almost identical pictures that gave me the idea of superimposing them. I do not think I would have had the idea if I had made all these pictures of the same places myself. Anyway, the work would loose its meaning.
Q: Did you ever visit and photograph these places yourself?
A: Yes, of course! I received my very first camera at the age of eight. I had the opportunity around that age to visit the Leaning Tower, the Eiffel Tower and the Acropolis. I still have those photographs today!
Q: The places you have used are all in our collective memories. Why do you think we (still) have to take pictures of them when we visit such places?
A: Since its emergence, photography has been used to identify and take inventory of the buildings, as well as make monuments famous, turning them into symbols. These monument symbols motivate the desire to travel to see them. It is often a long trip to visit Paris, for example, just to see the Eiffel Tower or the Mona Lisa. It is possible that there will not be another opportunity to return.
We are looking at a monument that we somehow already know. As a part of knowing that we have also been there, we need the photograph to fix the memory of our visit. By pressing the shutter button, time becomes event, a unique moment. The significance of the representation of the subject is shifted to the presence of the photographers themselves.
The images made by tourists are picture imitations. They demonstrate the desire to produce a photograph of an image that already exists, one like those we have already seen. It is in fact a style of manipulating the viewer. Why do we always take the same picture, if not to interact with what already exists? The photograph proves our presence. And to be true, the picture will be perfectly consistent with the pictures in our collective memory.
Q: What are the dimensions of the finished works?
A: The finished works are 30x40cm. For my portfolio of ‘photo opportunities’, I sent myself postcards through a system offered by the postal service. It is possible to use their website to make images printed as postcards and then send them by snail mail. During an exhibition, I would love to offer visitors this opportunity to send postcards this way.
Q: What is your background as an artist and photographer?
A: I studied photography for a year at the Paris VIII University and continued on as an autodidact. Since 2004, I have had much more time for my personal work. Last year, I won a grant, which has really helped me concentrate on my various works. These are really precious moments.
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Photographs, experiences and memories
David Crouch
In Corinne Vionnet`s artistic reworking of photographs taken by others there is a fascinating, tantalising merging, mingling and commingling of feelings of iconic places. Each of these sites is a landmark, the sights worth seeing; in german, die Sehenswurdigkeiten. Rather than brash, upfront, stereotypical in-your-face images, these are something very different. They linger in and as memory; as we look at them we reflect, try to make something out. Images seen from a railway carriage or car; flicked over in a magazine, or flickered in front of us on a television screen. Yet these images are something different again. Each image makes distinctive, subtle but insistent interplay with us, with our memories, desires, hopes and feelings.
Each image is taken from an original available on photo share websites. What for me makes Corinne`s series `Photo Opportunities` so resonant, so vibrant, is in the uncertainty even in major, world-recognition sites. The images can be read as either fast, glanced at in a whirlwind of movement, of mobility, hastening from place to place. Or as a hesitancy. As blurred images taken by tourists, the photographs also semi-detach the images from any one experience: they merge, but lose no sight of their deeper feeling and meaning for those who took them. But her kind of art presents these personal memories into a wider, and deeper, memory: shared, collective, continually being available and reworked. They are not her photographs; they become her photographs.
For me photographs do not dominate experiences; they flow together; mingle and merge, fall apart; memories become remembered in fragments and so on. Memories and expectations, desires slip between moments of `being there`, feeling and becoming engaged; of memory, stories, and visual imagery we might have seen. In being a tourist, however, the space, the site, becomes `ours` for our selves; the experience becomes our own. We make it so as we engage it. Rather than dull consumers, we are active, whoever we are, in making places, spaces, in making tourism, with a little help from others, the media and business. The picture, the photograph, individuals, tourists may take may be a mirror of others`. But it is also theirs; their own; `mine`. Where I was, then, with...
Lurking between myth and memory are visual notes, or excitements and provocations, of places, sites and events that we have visited when we become tourists. Our myths and memories are personal, shared, as well as implanted through popular media and its projection to us of the, or a, character of those places. It is often forgotten that visiting somewhere, we are most likely already to have visited somewhere else. We have memory of visiting, even as a child; we have probably also glanced at something on television, in film, a brochure, that happens to connect in some way with a place we have visited- or is similar to it, either in its character or because it is a much-visited site that might have been stereotyped in stories, or, for example, visual culture, perhaps in photography.
The books called `501` and `1001 places/countries/cities/islands/natural wonders-to-visit` set up their own cultural play with us, with our thoughts, desires: where to go that might be considered, or proffered to be, great; that is rated great, and so on. There is a feeling of making great sites popular; a dimension of shared, contemporary culture and cultural reference: where we can identify our lives with; with others who in imagination on commercial promotion of in living have also been there or wants to go. We can be sceptical on the power of visual and other material to shape our lives and expectations.
These kinds of popular books and images rerun the popularisation of stories about adventure and journeys that span over more than two centuries: the Grand Tour of the eighteenth and nineteenth century being as a particular European version of tourism-in-culture: a particular currency amongst a class of people. In a middle-distance history sit the photographies of Kodak and Disney Corporation`s portfolio of place to go and to photograph; and the experience of being in a great place when actually it is a model down-in-size at Disney World. Are these what places are for us, just someone else`s sights made only visual, for us to see? And when we get there we take the photograph we have already seen somewhere before?
Therefore my suggestion on what is at work here is as follows. We can be affected by the image, usually but not always visual, that someone else has already taken and that we have seen. People are not so thoughtless, passive, servile, so easily led. Rather than photographs providing a template, they can provide a reference, a reference to a memory or something we wish was in our memory, like a longing, or provocation amongst others. They can enrich the mixture in which we place our own experience. They share mindspace with stories, with sounds, with friends who have shared with us of these same places and other similar ones they have, or want to visit- and why they want to do so. Particular sites become merged, blurred trophies; in our lives they do not stand out as in the pages of the `1001` books. They blur amongst much bigger experiences. Our photographs are personal and shared reminders, and come alongside the making of myths in a popular visual culture of our own, sharing experience of `being there`, in vivo. Shared popular visual culture includes friends` photographs and stories, postcards we have received and sent; narratives that background their pictures.
Ideas emerging around `being a tourist` energise the way we think about photographs. I disdain the word tourism as it tends to reduce the whole experience to being a zombie, corporate management, manipulation. 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. These positions are less poles apart but mixture that resonates with who we feel we are. Sites we visit become changed in our experience of being there, and its follow-on of memory when we get back `home`. But being there may be what it feels to be at home; to belong. Being a tourist is as much of belonging as escaping; it can be a chance to reflect on our lives for a moment; but we always carry that life in us. And there is also always the possibility in being a tourist, in making our journeys, that we find new life and feelings emerge; we can, even only for a while, become something, someone else.
David Crouch, 2009
Professor of Cultural Geography, University of Derby; edited books include Vsiual Culture and Tourism Berg 2003, The Media and the Tourist Imagination Routledge 2005. Member of Research Assessment Exercise UK 2008 highest graded 4* Team: `Culture, Communications and Media Studies` University of Derby. author of research papers n tourism, visual culture, landscape, space, leisure; contributor to exhibition catalogues and popular works; author to People of the Hills, with professional photographer Richard Grassick, Amber Films- Side Gallery 1999; producer BBC2 Film 1994. Exhibiting artist. particular contributions include: Flirting with space; in Seductions of Tourism, ed. Carolyn Cartier and Alan Lew; Routledge 2005