Ice cream cones for everyone

One of my co-workers forwarded me a link to this great photo gallery.  The artist, Peter Funch, calls his project "Babel Tales."  Over the course of several years, Funch would stand in the same location in New York City for weeks at a time, photographing hundreds of passers-by against the same backdrop.  Later, he superimposed individual scenes on top of each other, combining the real images to create a surreal scene.

So, instead of the mix of tourists, street vendors, and businesspeople that you might expect to see populating a shot of Times Square at any given hour, Funch presents a series of images featuring only crouching photographers, or only people posing for pictures.  Similarly, streets become filled with chefs, dog-walkers, or people dressed in white.  From the description of the project on Funch's website:

His uncanny work raises questions of reality contra fiction and challenges our notion of photography as being a depiction of a certain moment in time.

This is a particularly fascinating concept to me, since I value photography (and, for that matter, blogging) for precisely this reason.  Pictures and blog posts can preserve feelings and emotions that memory would otherwise allow to fade away. Funch's work counters this idea with fantastical scenes that you would normally associate only with the movies.  Except his images are actually, at least somewhat, real.  Viewing the gallery is thought provoking and vaguely unsettling but, overarchingly, very, very cool.

 

© Peter Funch 2011