As the Olympics unfold in their various venues around Paris, Corinne Vionnet has just completed the latest series in her ongoing “Photo Opportunities” body of work focusing on re-imagined images of Paris.
Beginning in 2004 (before many other contemporary artists began layering j-pegs pulled from the internet) what both struck and interested Corinne Vionnet was that when tourists went to a popular travel destination they generally tried to take a picture of the picture they had already seen or that is in the collective imagination rather than seeing it freshly through their own eyes. It occurred to Vionnet that if she searched various online tourist travel sites she could find multiple variations of the same “iconic” views and if she collected and layered approximately 100 of these images on top of each other she would arrive at a new conglomerate image that had a photographic basis, a painterly aspect, and a conceptual underpinning.
With the necessary skill to adjust the layers, Vionnet produced works that both time travel and crowd source. In her earlier picture of the Taj Mahal, for example, some of the layers date back to photographs taken over a hundred years ago.
Now adding to her photographic atlas, Vionnet has re-created images of Paris’s celebrated views – the Eiffel Tower, The Seine, The Arc de Triomphe, The Louvre, Notre Dame, The Centre Pompidou, and others. For photography connoisseurs there is even The Grand Palais.
Vionnet’s work has been exhibited and/or acquired by SF MoMA; The Victoria and Albert; The Musée Carnavalet; C/O Berlin; Chengdu Contemporary Image Museum; and Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao.