Heavily-edited Paris photo prompts online jokes
A heavily-edited photo showing Paris to be in front of a mountain range has been mocked online.
Despite being clearly false, the photo has appeared on Twitter entirely without irony, including the San Francisco-based @ItsTravelVibes account, which has over 900,000 followers and which posted it with the simple caption: “Let’s go to France”.
In fact, the edited photo was created by a Croatian designer, Renato Prkic, who goes by the name of 8thdamon on Twitter and creates science-fiction-esque photos.
The photo of Paris in question had never been intended to be used as an accurate depiction of the city, and it was taken and used without Prkic's permission.
That has not stopped Twitter users, who have been quick to jump on the joke, adding their own “Paris travel photos” to the thread.
This has included a photo of a “Paris RER train making its way to Châtelet - Les Halles”, through what appears to be an Alpine mountain backdrop, and a photo purporting to show the “Metro Ligne 1” underground station with a restaurant apparently selling “kebabs for €5 under the Seine”, with a clearly-false, aquarium-style roof under deep blue, fish-filled water.
Another tweet claimed - obviously falsely - that “you can have a marvellous breakfast on a terrace on the Eiffel Tower”, accompanied by a photo showing a huge mountain in the background.
Another showed a single car making its way down a deserted road, with the sarcastic tweet “Here’s the morning routine of a Parisian worker enjoying the sunrise on the Boulevard Périphérique Porte d’Aubervilliers”.
Prkic’s other heavily-retouched, obviously-false photos include one of London’s Big Ben tower surrounded by mountains, New York’s Manhattan next to a gigantic waterfall, and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge attacked by giant octopus tentacles.
