The Art of Removal

Tourist Remover is an online app that can remove moving objects from your vacation snapshots. It does so by comparing several photos from the same angle and removing whatever isn't common to all photos (see above).

Removing unwanted folks from photos has a long tradition:



The tourist photo that jumped to my mind is Francis Alÿs's Turista (1996). So this morning I photoshopped No Turista (2009):


Here's a thumbnail animation of the alteration:


Andy Baio recently posted Meme Scenery on his blog in which he removes the people from 23 famous Internet photos/videos:


Baio points to Jon Haddock's Internet Sex Photos as inspiration:


An earlier work in the same vein is Naomi Uman's Removed (1999) in which she removed a writhing, naked woman from a soft-core porn film. Uman also create Touch My Body (De-Mariahed) in response to Oliver Laric’s Touch My Body (Green Screen Version) (2008).

Neils Bonde's Bad Days series involves painting out scenes of tragedy and pain from newspaper clippings. I admire the non-digital-ness of his process:


And of course mention must be made of Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953):


Addendum, 7/23/09: To this round up I'd also add Desiree Palmen's camouflage work