Man Who Takes Terrible Tourist Photos Has 340,000 Instagram Followers
PARIS — Pierre Aubert, 38, who has been offering to take group photographs for tourists at Paris landmarks since 2021 and who takes each photograph badly in a specific, considered way — cutting off one person’s head, placing the Eiffel Tower between two subjects, capturing mid-blink, or producing the dramatic under-angle that makes everyone’s chin the primary subject — has built an Instagram account around his work called “@LePhotopasseur” (The Photo Ferryman) that has attracted 340,000 followers who find the gallery of technically terrible but carefully considered bad photography more interesting than the technically correct tourist photographs they take themselves.
“Every bad photograph is intentional,” Pierre explained. “The tourists don’t always know immediately. Sometimes they look at the screen and say ‘oh.’ Sometimes they ask me to do it again. I do it again, correctly, because I’m not cruel. But the first version is mine.”
The Gallery
The gallery contains 847 photographs taken at Paris’s major tourist sites across three years, each accompanied by a caption noting the technical failure employed and what Pierre calls “the accidental truth” the failure produces. The Notre-Dame reconstruction photographs taken from too low produce a cathedral that appears to lean over its subjects with protective menace. The Louvre photographs taken during a cloud shadow produce subjects in dramatic chiaroscuro. The Eiffel Tower mid-blink series has been exhibited at a small gallery in the 11th arrondissement.
According to the Centre Pompidou’s contemporary photography research, intentional failure as artistic method has a documented history in French photography. Pierre’s method applies it to the tourist photograph’s genre conventions. The tourists get a good photograph on the second attempt. The gallery gets the first attempt.
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