Icons – ‘Making-of’s of the best-known and most impressive photos in history

The photo series ‘Icons’ is an unusual, but highly interesting side project of Jojakim Cortis and Adrian Sonderegger, two professional photographers from Switzerland. The duo had the idea for the project in 2012 when a large-size print of the picture “Rhein II” by Andreas Gursky was sold for the record sum of $4.3m. Wired.com reported that the entire thing started off as a joke – the idea being to duplicate the most expensive and most well-known photos of the world.

Below you can see the original by Andreas Gursky.

After “Rhein II” they happily continued with what they were doing and by now more than a dozen of the best-known photos of world history have been copied. Since the two Swiss want to draw attention to the danger of misinterpreting photos taken out of context – even some of the best-known, like the one of Nessie, later turned out to be fakes – none of the photos have been cropped. It is always visible how the picture was taken. I have only added some pictures below, always in pairs. The rest you can find on the website of Cortis and Sonderegger. The photo from the icons-series is always above and the respective original below. 🙂