The Colosseum

Spanish photographer Pep Ventosa‘s layered snapshots are shizophrenic, to say the least. The photographs, part of a series entitled “The Collective Snapshot”, are comprised of multiple images of several landmarks, ranging from the Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge to Stonehenge and the Taj Mahal, layered on top of the other and rendered with varying degrees of opacities that constitute a spectral play of shifting horizons, half-structures, and fluctuating streams of pedestrians. Continue.

Taj Mahal

The Louvre

Sydney Opera House

Ventosa collages numerous singular compositions (i.e. the “personal photographic record”), each with their own perspectives and properties, that nevertheless gaze at the same object of desire. The resultant compositions distill the act of travel and movement into an all-encompassing visual palimpsest that negates the landmark’s claims to permanence to reveal the fractured histories and collective memories that lie beneath its staid visage. As documents, Ventosa’s images underscores the snapshot’s inherent subjectivity, as opposed to photography’s axiomatic virtue of perfectly simulating objective reality, and, in doing so, work to recover the “otherness” that impelled the medium’s ghostly beginnings.

The Brandenburg Gate

The Palace of Westminster

Tiananmen Square

Twin Pagodas

Stonehenge; All images: Pep Ventosa

[via MyModernMet]

by Samuel Medina

posted in Uncategorized

tagged collage, Colosseum, eiffel tower, layer, memory, photography, snapshot, Taj Mahal

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