The View From Famous Landmarks

Since 2012, Oliver Curtis has visited a slew of landmarks, camera in hand: Giza, Buckingham Palace, the Colosseum, the Statue of Liberty. Yet all of them are absent from his photographs.

For his series Volte-face, or “about-face,” the English photographer took an unusual approach to sightseeing and trained his lens not on the monuments themselves, but on what they look out upon. In doing so, he situates these renowned sites in a world that’s both familiar and comfortingly mundane.