A new perspective: tourist photos given an "impressionist" revamp

What happens when you layer hundreds of tourist photographs on top of each other of the Eiffel Tower or Tiananman Square? You get an image that sort of resembles an Impressionist painting, but from a digital era. Here are 10 of the world’ most famous landmarks, like you’ve never seen them before.

Corinne Vionnet, a Swiss photographer, has created by far the most impressive images of the world’s most famous monuments and landmarks, but not with her own camera. She has layered somewhere between 200 and 300 photographs found on the web taken by other tourists. The results are stunning. While you can still see the “ghosts” of the tourists through the many layers, if you stand back you’d easily mistake it for an Impressionist painting.

What makes your snapshot of the Taj Mahal different from the photo that another tourist is taking right beside you? Not a whole lot except that after your trip you’ve got proof that you were there, in that very spot, to take that very photo. Corinne Vionnet’s project, entitled Photo Opportunities, took this idea and turned it upside down, creating her very own, and very unique tourist snapshots.

“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 lose its meaning.”