The new display at the BAL in Paris, Wall/Paper #3, is showcasing Me, Her, Now, the latest book by Corinne Vionnet, published by the Fall Line Press. Exploring collective memory, the photographer’s work examines our relation to space and how it influences our own perception and the way we view our environment. Directly referencing the work of the French engineer Abraham Moles on the philosophy of centrality, Me, Here, Now captures the precise moment when travelers, armed with their cellphones, capture nearly identical mementos representing, in their minds, a unique experience. Beyond the ritual of the holiday snapshot, these images — often shared instantly — constitute a new form of language, akin to Roland Barthes’s “certificates of presence” or Susan Sontag’s “photograph-trophies.” Conditioning new reflexes, the advent of the smartphone has also shaped a set of singular and disconcerting gestures which, according to the American writer Marvin Heiferman, are evocative of a quasi-mystical posture. Equipped with these new objects of domestic devotion, the tourists in Me, Here, Now challenge our way of perceiving reality, going so far as to make us wonder whether we prefer its substitute, a partial reality, or even the unreal. Portraits of anonymous people half-hidden behind the screen of their mobile phone, raise questions about the ubiquity of surveillance in public spaces and remind us that our every move may well be photographed.
https://www.lebalbooks.com/fr/home/201-me-here-now-corinne-vionnet.html
