Artist Corinne Vionnet creates what at first appear to be Impressionist-style paintings by searching photo sharing sites using keywords for travel landmarks and then layering 200-300 of the photos of the same site on top of one another, creating this Impressionist effect.

The work is both catchy and amusing as well as slightly haunting and creepy, raising questions like, “Why do we take the same photos over and over? To prove we’ve been there?” “Is our experience of a place belittled and made tritewhen confronted with the reality that thousands of others have been there and chosen to capture the moment the exact same way?”

Or, one could see it as life and community-affirming in a way– even though so many have taken this same shot

before, it remains important and significant to the individual, and by taking the shot, and then uploading it to a photo sharing site, we all continue to contribute to a collective memory and to broaden the base of things we all as humans value and crave to experience.

I think this project could send me off on philosophical wonderings for quite a while, in a neverending argument with myself, so I’ll stop now and let you just enjoy this feat of technology. How cool is it that online photo sharing made something like this possible??

Ok and one final thought– a daydream I think about a lot that is relevant to this post– Have you ever wondered how many other people’s travel photos you appear in? Wouldn’t it be cool if face-recognition technology could scan photo-sharing sites and identify all the photos you’ve appeared in all over the world??

[via Fast Co.]

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