The Gates is a massive art installation by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in Central Park, New York City. It’s only going to last for a little over two weeks. As a result, Central Park has been packed. Most of the people packing the park have come with cameras in hand.
Today, Mika and I went to visit central park to see it under some freshly fallen snow. Rather than take pictures of the gates, which everybody does, we decided to (sneakily) take pictures of the people taking pictures of the gates.
We’re calling the resulting photo-documentary Picturesque: Picture of Pictures of the Gates.
How very meta
I like it!
One of my favorite photography passtimes is to go to a popular monument or place and instead of stand away from it taking pictures of the “thing” – I walk right up to it, turn around and take pictures of what the thing looks at; people taking pictures, dustbins whatever.
It’s reverse sight-seeing! :-)
I wish I had thought of that…
I went to the gates a couple of times, taking a lot of pictures with my digicam, and I kept noticing how everywhere you turned there were people taking pictures. This has got to be some sort of record for the number of digital photographs of an event (and since they’re mainly digital, how many find their way to the internet).
D’oh, I think I actually was trying to avoid taking pictures that included other photographers so as not to clutter up my own shots.
Imagine what would have happened if in the fine print it said that you had to pay the artists some sort of copyright licensing fee for photographs, say a few cents per photo.