The lines of opportunity

How many of us have been to Pisa and taken a photograph of its precariously angled tower? Or carefully composed the shot with our friend's arm sticking out at just the right angle so it looks like they are nonchalantly supporting the structure with their little finger? There must be millions of that image in holiday albums all over the world, which is exactly what occurred to the Swiss-French photographer Corinne Vionnet, whose new exhibition, Photo Opportunity, opened this week at The Empty Quarter Gallery in Dubai's DIFC, when she visited the Northern Italian town.

"When I was in front of the leaning tower, I just realised how many pictures people were taking," she says. She was so struck with the idea, that she did a rough calculation on the spot and estimates millions of photographs have been taken of the monument. Soon, she was exploring numbers in other tourist destinations. "You can find out how many people travelled to Paris and estimate how many of them might have gone to the Eiffel Tower, and how many of them in turn may have taken a photograph of it," she says.

The fact that so many people are compelled to take a similar shot of the places they visit prompted Vionnet to question people's relationship with the visual culture that surrounds them, as well as the representation and memory of spaces. "The point of the project is to ask questions about the links between visual culture and tourism," she says. "How and why do we try to relate to a place by taking a picture?"

Thanks to the explosion of online photo sharing, all that was required for her research was a quick web search, which yielded thousands of photographic results of monuments around the world. She decided to express her ideas by layering about 100 similarly composed shots of the same building on top of one another with the same percentage of transparency. "It was a way of proving that even though you put them on top of one another, you can still find the monument," she says. "It's still there."

Among the monuments she experimented with and that feature in the exhibition are Big Ben in London, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and Dubai's Burj al Arab. Though softly blurred and almost ethereal, her subjects are instantly recognisable. The Taj Mahal's great white dome stands against a bright blue sky, a sea of ghostly figures filling the foreground. And the spiked roofs of London's Houses of Parliament have a wistful Turner-like quality, as if they're quivering in the fog. The effect is deliberately un-photographic, she explains, because she also wanted to draw on the origins of visual culture.

"I wanted it to be related to painting and etching, so I wanted the effect to resemble that," she says. "That was how we learnt about monuments in the past, in the days before photography." Her findings have led her to believe that congregating in labelled "photo opportunity" spots to capture monuments on film are a way of relating both physically and emotionally with a place. "Once you are there, you need to act by pressing the button, to say, OK, I was here," she says.

It is, however, less about showing others that you have been there than reminding yourself. "It's more about creating a memory of the place you have been." Vionnet chose her subjects according to statistical tourist information. Monuments from East and West have been given the same painstaking treatment, including Istanbul's Blue Mosque, the Kabah in Mecca, Petra in Jordan and the Mont Saint-Michel in France.

There were other monuments she would love to have included, in particular the Great Wall of China, she says, but the nature of the project meant that she was limited to structures of a certain size, so she could layer the images correctly. "It's a very long wall, which means there are too many different ways of photographing it." She plans to continue with this type of compositional work, using photographs from the internet to explore how subjects are captured.

"Maybe I'll work with family pictures next," she says. "Conceptually, I would like to express other ways in which pictures have been taken as a way of exploring sociological behaviour." Photo Opportunity by Corinne Vionnet is at The Empty Quarter Fine Art Photography Gallery, Gate Village, DIFC, Dubai, until May 4. For more information, call 050 553 3879.