Artwork Appreciation
When we visit well-known tourist attractions, we always want to press the shutter when there are few people around. However, the artist Liao Che-I turned the camera towards tourists at the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Italy and Köln Cathedral in Germany, and photographed the “tourists’ landscape.” He always stood at a distance from the crowd, watching everything happening in front of him from a broad perspective, like scenes projected on the walls of Plato’s cave. In Plato’s allegory of the cave, a group of prisoners are tied up and can only see the shadows on a wall. For those who have had no chance to get out of the cave, the shadows are real. Even though there are no post-production techniques here, the images here are thought out in advance, and the photographer chose his scenes and waited for the right moment to take each shot. In other words, they seem like real images, but they have been designed, like the “shadows in the cave.” Through this tourist series, Liao Che-I prompts us to think about the distance between appearance and reality.