Corinne Vionnet brings together travel photos in an impressionist retrospective at the Pont-Aven museum

For 20 years, Corinne Vionnet collected on the Internet, social networks, blogs, identical photos representing the same sites, but taken at eras, different seasons, by people who did not know each other, but immortalized their memories as vacation. “I worked on collective memory. My work is a reflection on the sharing and repetition of images, in the digital age, social networks and mass tourism. There is a melting of time in the same space, ”explains the artist. After having selected a few thousand photos herself, mostly taken by smartphones, she gathered them on each other, overlapping them, moderating them, putting them in transparency, until you get a blurred effect that does not is reminiscent of the pictorial style of Impressionists. “There is a connotation to painting that seduced me in this superposition technique,” says the photographer.

For the exhibition which is currently being held until May 4, 2025 at the Musée de Pont-Aven (Finistère), the artist created two works on the close city of Concarneau (Finistère), and the tip of Pen-Hir, Two of the most photographed sites in Finistère. “We find through another bias, the photo, a new look at landscapes,” said Sophie Kervran, chief curator of the Pont-Aven museum.

The exhibition is an invitation to travel through the eyes of thousands of people. The “Photo Opportunities” series allows you to discover the emblematic monuments or sites of the world, such as the Sacred Heart, the Moulin Rouge, the Pyramids of Egypt, through superimpositions of a little blurred postcards. “For Paris, it’s a real tourist stroll. What is interesting in this image puzzle is also to make people meet. I played on small details, a man with a child, a bus, ”says the artist.

Without ever going there, we have an impression of “already seen” by admiring the series on the great American deserts, many and many times photographed or seen in a western. If we carefully examine the photos selected by Corinne Vionnet, we realize that, even if they immortalize a single site, there are still imperceptible details, shadows, colors that differ. “I selected 987 images from the same point of view. I still had to visualize 200,000 photos. I then reframed them to obtain the same effect, ”she explains.

Zoom on mass tourism

Corinne Vionnet also became interested in those who take the photos of their mobile phone: “I photographed them setting a monument, hidden behind their smartphone. I then reapphoned these portraits with my mobile phone, then enlarged the images with a veil of pixels. “The message is clear:” What relationship do we have with a site when we face it if we look at him behind the screen of a smartphone? “Explains Sophie Kervran.

One of the artist’s most remarkable creations is undoubtedly this wall of 11 linear photos representing the different emblematic places of Paris. “I wanted to highlight mass tourism by zooming in various Parisian monuments. I made the photos myself, then superimposed them to give this impression of disorder, frenzy with dozens of silhouettes that intersect, “underlines Corinne Vionnet, who estimates the number of images broadcast per second in the world , through the networks, at around 60,000, 95 % of which are made with a smartphone. Her only regret is that she would like to see them all …