Award-winning London-based photographer Oleg Tolstoy has us smiling from ear to ear with his latest series “The Tourist Trap” which hilariously documents unbeknownst tourists in Florence lost in their very own viewfinders. If you’re anything like me you’re just happy you weren’t in the beloved Italian city when Oleg was shooting because I’ve definitely been guilty of this precise crime. Over the course of two visits and ten days spent by Florence’s historic Duomo, Oleg has created an eye-catching set of visual paradoxes: portraits of strangers in a strange land that are somehow intimate and completely unguarded.

“Everyone was so busy taking photos, listening to audio guides and gawping upwards that they barely registered my presence, even when I was just feet away” the photographer explains. “It was comical, but poignant. They’ve travelled across the world to be here, but in the act of obsessively making thousands of bits of postcard-perfect content to show to friends back home, they’re lost in their viewfinders and not really aware of their surroundings at all.”

“Some of their expressions reminded me of catholic depictions of ecstasy” Oleg notes. “Like past pilgrims, these visitors to the cathedral are lost to a higher power, but in this case, it’s modern technology.”