I don’t remember where I came across this recently since the story is over a year old. Photographer Oliver Curtis embarked on an interesting project where he started taking pictures with his back to famous landmarks.
The project came about back in 2012, when Curtis was visiting the Pyramids of Giza. Upon turning around, he realized that he had never seen the “hidden side” of that well-known place. So, he began documenting these views in a project of his own…
In each of the photos in the series, captured over the past 4 years, the viewer is told where the photo was captured and is invited to look upon the scene without the smallest glimpse of the actual landmark that people visit from all over the world to see.
The full collection of images for the Volte-Face project are on the artist’s website. If you want the challenge of trying to guess where things are without the benefit of visible captions, you should view it there.
He has images facing away from the Statue of Liberty, The Great Wall of China, Taj Mahal, Buckingham Palace and dozens of other places.
What initially hooked me was his photograph facing away from the Mona Lisa. We hear tales of people rushing through the Louvre and crowding in front of the painting trying to get a picture. It either wasn’t crowded in the gallery when he took the picture or he stood with his back to the crowd. The sense of this is what you are missing if you focus solely on the famous was interesting to me.
I won’t claim to always be observant and absorb all my surroundings when I am visiting a famous place, but I think I do a pretty good job of taking in my surroundings.
What is sometimes surprising is just how mundane and unassuming some of the places appear when you have your back turned to them. The bench and pool in front of the Taj Mahal, you would expect based on pictures of the landmark. However, the fresh tree stump and apartment buildings taken while facing away from the Eiffel Tower makes you wonder how close to the structure he was when he took the picture. The same with the utterly unremarkable view away from the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.
I find this fascinating and illuminating! I think our absorption by the ‘famous’ is maybe just an extreme version (symptomatic, at least) of the human temptation to abstract points of interest from the places they dwell. And it makes sense to do this, or we wouldn’t get so caught up making pretenses about things in isolation. There is definite INsight when we absorb into the things in question. Removed from the shackles of where these things actually take place, the contexts that give them life, the actual homes they inhabit, we take on an otherwise impossible sense of freedom in how these things make sense.
They make sense separate from the human context, as if the humanity has been sucked out of them. We get to have this clear and unobstructed view, removed from the messy human contingency. We get to look at things as things-in-themselves, as isolated objects. And from this removed and antiseptic vantage point we can inspect and dissect the patient and diagnose its problems. This is simply how we work, as humans. We treat the disease, not the person. We are driven to forget the actual location in our lives of the things that interest us.
Turning our backs on this temptation to abstraction is maybe a symbolic gesture, as if we needed to deny these famous bits in some respect to actually SEE where they are at home. It is also, I think, a necessary step to giving us back the humanity of our interests.
You can probably guess that my next point is that our obsession with the instrumental view of the arts is just such an abstraction that we need to get ourselves over. The view from above that puts the value of the arts in this ‘objective’ causal/functional relationship is a complete abstraction from where, in point of fact, the arts are located in people’s lives. We are too happy to look at the arts from the outside, as an object under the microscope, as a lab specific entity, that we forget its real place in real human lives.
The brilliance of this photographer’s project is that it describes a way-of-life that itself does not include the thing at its back. The object drops out. The way of life stands front and center. People doing things, the context, the setting of the stage, all have a life of their own. And we need to understand this to reclaim the sense of importance that allowed us to become absorbed in the first place. The object fits that particular function only by being situated amidst the hurly burly of normal human beings doing normal things. Our abstraction is the thing most out of place. Our abstraction denies the setting. It is the postcard picture. So perhaps the sooner we turn our backs on the abstraction the more realistically we can resume a sense of where things fit in human lives.