Corinne Vionnet: Me. Here Now.

ME. Here Now explores collective memory and how our relationships to space define our perceptions of ourselves and our environment. 

The advent of smartphones has conditioned new reflexes and created a new, unsettling gestural vocabulary that evokes a near-mystical posture.

A direct reference to the work of Abraham Moles on the philosophy of centrality, ME. Here Now captures the specific moment when tourists take, with their smartphones, near-identical pictures of what is, paradoxically and for them, a unique experience. Beyond the ritual of holiday pictures, these images — often instantly shared — create a new language, as with the certificate of presences by Roland Barthes or with the photograph-trophies by Susan Sontag.

Vionnet’s portraits of these nameless individuals, half-concealed behind smartphone screens, also underscore the omnipresence of surveillance in public areas and remind us that all of our wanderings may be photographed.