Original Copy | 2001-2003
Left: Original post card / Right: photograph copy
4" x 6" each
A large series of colour photographs taken of places I recently visited for the first time including tourist traps, roadside attractions, historic buildings and monuments. The photos represent the ‘quintessential image’ for a tourist to capture of each place as they are taken from the exact spot a pre-existing postcard version was shot from which I use as a guide. While the vantage point remains the same, the conditions that I take my versions under are not staged and may therefore include other tourists, bad weather etc. The photos are enlarged to 16x24” then framed and hung in a single continuous row around the gallery without any space between them. The excessive amount of images, installed in a random looking order, depicts the monotony of viewing vacation photos from a friend’s recent trip while it admits to the compulsive need of taking snaps of mundane scenes we would not look twice at if it were near home.
The original postcards can be viewed in my ‘living room’, a separate space built within the gallery which includes furniture, art objects, the contents of my credenza and a carpet. Rather than display the actual postcards, slide versions are part of an automatic loop of small projections on one of the living room walls which allows for a comparison between the photos and postcards without allowing them to be seen at the same time. The projection of images from recent trips suggests the days past of vacation slide shows to friends, however, the idea is mocked by using the idyllic version of each place rather than the true experience.