The Framed World

Tourism, Tourists and Photography

David Picard, Mike Robinson, David Picard, Mike Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754673682
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351889421
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Photographs create visual narratives of experiences, places, peoples and objects that collectively and individually comprise the tourist gaze. Photography is acknowledged as having an important role in the determining of places and spaces, the construction and re-construction of identities, and the invention and re-invention of histories. So why do tourists take photos of certain things and not of others? Why do tourists take photos at all? How do photos build places, how do they change and shape lives? An interdisciplinary team of contributors from across the globe explore such questions as they examine the relationships between photography and tourism and tourists.

Chapter 1
Moments, Magic and Memories: Photographing Tourists, Tourist Photographs and Making Worlds

Mike Robinson and David Picard

Introduction

To be a tourist, it would seem, involves taking photographs. Whilst photography is clearly not the exclusive preserve of tourists it nonetheless is one of the markers of being a tourist (Markwell 1997), is intimately linked to the doing and performing of tourism (Bærenholdt et al. 2004) and, is indeed a constituent element of the tourism industry as it works and plays with the signs and images of visual culture that is everyday life (Mirzoeff 1998) in order to project parts of the world onto other parts of the world. Susan Sontag, writing over thirty years ago, highlights the apparently normative and accepted relationship between tourists and photography and comments that; ‘it seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera along’ (1977, p. 9). More precisely, the obvious presence of a camera about the person has tended to delineate someone as a tourist, or rather as someone who is equipped as a tourist; primed to capture images of a different place (Edensor 1998). As John Hutnyk (1996, p. 145) notes: ‘Holiday photography is the record which shows, no matter how rushed the visit, that what was seen was what was there’. This notion of recording encompasses a variety of practices and rituals in itself, but it extends beyond ideas of collection and record and into the realms of self-making, authentication and socialization processes which are bound up with the embodied doing of tourism (Crouch 2000, 2002; Crouch and Lübbren 2003). The holiday photograph evidences not just the tourist site but the tourist him/herself, in a form of expressive self-creation (crang 1999).

Stereotypes of American and Japanese tourists conspicuously bearing the latest photo-technology around their necks are still prevalent within popular depictions of ‘holiday-makers’ and despite any emergent reflexivities amongst tourists, and for toured communities, the carrying of a camera still signifies an ‘outsider’. Orvar Lofgren (1999, p. 82) comments: ‘The fact that a dangling camera has become the sign of the vulgar tourist poses a problem for those who feel a need to distance themselves: should they carry a camera at all?’ In line with contemporary digital technologies and the advent of photo-mobile phones, cameras are now widely carried in the course of daily life; we are almost perpetually primed to click.

However, it is within vacation spaces and times when cameras are still at their most visible and indispensable. The tourist becomes a photographer in an instant. Craft, training and technological prowess of photographing are quickly learnt, or indeed bypassed, as the sense of the moment takes over. Sometimes spontaneous, sometimes staged, the being in a different environment and ‘on holiday’, not only presents opportunities for taking large numbers of photographs, but also for the full range of rituals which accompany tourist photography before, during and after the trip.

Underlying the momentary and apparently frivolous act of taking photographs while on holiday are a host of searching questions which link to the ways in which tourists experience and negotiate the world and the ways in which the world regards tourism. Why do tourists take photographs? Why do tourists frame certain things, while other things remain outside of the frame? How do tourists photograph the Eiffel Tower or Native American Chiefs and the vast variety of peoples, places and events which they encounter? What does it mean when tourists ‘shoot’, ‘capture’ or ‘take’ photographs? How does tourism photography mediate or change the realm of the photographed? Who controls tourist photography and who ‘owns’ the photographic image? do tourist photographs need captions or ‘voice-overs’? What happens to tourist photographs once tourists have returned home? What do tourist photographs tell us about the relation between the photographer and the photographed? This list of questions is far from being exhaustive and spills over into wider and fundamental issues relating to visual culture and its dominance within the modern world; issues such as those relating to power, authority, aesthetics, play and individual/collective identity. The tourism industry (comprising tour operators, airlines, accommodation providers and destination marketing authorities etc.) has long been versed in presenting the world and its peoples through photographs, and in doing so it implicates itself in the construction of influential narratives which reach beyond the sphere of tourism and into generic narratives of representation. Understanding the relationship between tourism, tourists and photography is a way of approaching some of the most vivacious theoretical, epistemological and ethical debates taking place within the field of tourism studies over the past thirty years.

Bringing the World Home

Travel and exploration as the great projects of the Renaissance relied upon ways of recording the world. Discovery, conquest and encounter were not only based upon the physical acts of travel, battle and trade but significantly upon the representations and circulations of these acts to the vast majority of populations who essentially remained ‘at home’. Here was the educational function of travel as mediated through the texts and images produced ‘in situ’ and brought back for conspicuous display. While journal narratives and diaries were important, it was the visual recordings of destinations and peoples which provided the greatest impact of the various forays into an expanding world, albeit amongst a rather narrowly defined social elite. Watercolour and pencil sketches from both professional and amateur artists, captured an emerging world; a myriad of sites and sights, some of which had been described first, second or third hand, and others which were truly ‘new’ and also those which were wholly imagined. Paintings in the vein of the classical and sublime aesthetic and the emergent picturesque, of the ruins of athens and Rome, or of landscapes and natural features, were displayed in the galleries and libraries of leading houses, integrated to their gardens, and were reproduced as woodcuts, engravings and lithographs in books. Though the landscapes, objects and events recorded through the grand tours of Europe and explorations beyond, fashioned, and in some cases, accentuated tastes, this was more than a subjective artistic endeavour; it constituted attempts to ‘capture’, order and curate the world in the very process of it being discovered (Boorstin 1985) and introduced the earliest semblances of a visual culture as something not only participated in and understood by individuals, but as something circulated and shared through society.

Judith Adler in her consideration of the ‘Origins of Sightseeing’ (1998) has marked out the historical context for photography as a convergence between post-Renaissance science and travel, and the shift to objectification and the recording of ‘things’. In the ferment of secular travel and the discovery of ‘new’ topographies from the sixteenth century onwards, the privileging of sight and of seeing was a way in which travellers could, in Adler’s terms, ‘grasp this vast new world of things without being overwhelmed by it’ (p. 19). Despite the scientific reductionism inherent in the visual capture of the world, the mediation of this early gaze was via the paintbrush and pencil and the objects created were essentially works of art and thus still laden with the ambiguities of the imagination. They also required an educated ‘eye’ to appreciate them, something easily at hand since the audience for such representations of places near, and increasingly far, remained erudite social elite. The world was travelled, recorded and appreciated by a relatively small social grouping.

The introduction of photography in the late 1830s demonstrated several continuities but some important dis-junctures with the pictorial representations of an expanding world. The scientific ethos of objectifying the world was accentuated in that the interpretive veil of artistic representation was removed to produce novel realities. Though photographs were subject to manipulation, and a certain aesthetic continuity with paintings and prints in terms of style and framing, to all intents and purposes they allowed their audiences a far more direct way of seeing the world. In the early years of photography the audience for photographs remained as relatively small and select as it was for the paintings and sketchbooks of the upper classes. Significantly however, throughout the nineteenth century photography generated substantive new audiences amongst the growing middle classes. The fascination with the science of photography as a way of reducing and ordering the world was quickly overtaken by the practicalities of technology which was much more concerned with, and allowed, the rapid diffusion of images of the world. Photographic exhibitions which thrived during the nineteenth century were seldom viewed as any sort of artistic endeavour but rather as visual encyclopaedias which reflected the technological prowess behind transport developments and, through the frequent portrayal of places, also reflected colonial dominance.

It was the development of a new visual economy which saw the photographers selling negatives to libraries and commercial printers and publishers, which in turn distributed to an audience eager to consume the records of travel to distant lands. Photography by travellers allowed a relatively small number of individuals and groups to appropriate and moderate ideas of the diversity and difference in the world and essentially control an economy of images. But the boundaries of this economy were not easily fixed nor controlled. The visual is too appealing to be restricted. Photographs of the world spilled into the world through various forms of reproduction. As Peter Osbourne (2000) explains it:

The immediate application of photography to the depiction of travel is explained by the fact that it was, on the one hand, a crystallization of three hundred years of culture and science preoccupied with space and mobility and, on the other, the expressions of its own time – the epoch of capitalist globalisation, the construction of a new middle-class identity and the dramatic speeding-up of transportation and communication. Photography was a representational tool refined in the service of these processes. (p. 9)

Developments in photography since its discovery in the late 1830s have closely tracked developments in transport technologies and generally reflect processes of massification and ever-increasing circulations of knowledge about the world. Of course in the initial stages of development, photography as a practice was extremely limited in a very real sense as the equipment needed was not only expensive it was extremely cumbersome (Gautrand 1998). But for those travellers and explorers who did endure the trials of carrying around vast quantities of photographic equipment the rewards were great. The convergence of commercialism and photography was a far swifter, deliberate and more obvious process than that between commercialism and art. When Francis Frith, for instance, travelled and photographed the Middle East in the 1850s he was already well aware of the growing number of tourists to the iconic centres of Egypt, Palestine and Syria (Wilson 1985). Though Frith never engaged again in foreign exploration, the returns from his travels were significant and came in the form of exhibitions, lecture tours and magazine articles. The history of nineteenth century travel photography is essentially grouped around a number of technologically minded artists and commercially minded technophiles such as Frith, each playing a part in the structuring of what was to become the tourism industry. Photography created an essential shop window for the world and became an essential pillar of modernity, not only in terms of its underlying practical technological advances, but also as the means of documenting discovery and on-going social and cultural changes.

The marriage between photography and travel was marked not only by the relative perfection in which a subject or landscape could be captured, but also by the notion of immediacy; the sheer speed of the process of transformation from reality to its ‘accurate’ representation, generally mirroring a ‘speeding up’ of social life and the closing down of distances. It is immediacy which more than anything has defined the evolution of photography, what Walter Benjamin (2006) referred to as the ‘Here and Now’, as if ‘reality has, so to speak, seared the subject’. (p. 243)

Photography as Popular Culture and Instant Power?

Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, photography largely remained an activity of a relatively small number of producers and publishers. Prohibitive costs, bulky equipment and the dominance of a relatively small number of experienced photographers effectively controlled the circulation of images. Even tour operators such as Thomas Cook persisted in employing hand drawn illustrations in advertisements, posters and brochures well into the 1950s. The tourist of the early twentieth century would ostensibly rely upon the purchase of a photograph/postcard from an agent or distributor of a professional photographer. In destinations such as Egypt, Turkey and Greece tourists would be directed via guides and guidebooks to established photographers noted for their expertise, the quality of their studios and the extent of their views. Notably, these were generally Europeans who had travelled and settled in such countries as part of an active commercialization of ‘the Orient’ through the sale and distribution of photographs (Ryan 1997; Micklewright 2003). As katrina Thomas (1975) notes:

In Cairo, the Germans seem to have dominated the photographic scene from the first. In Baedeker’s egypt, Handbook for Travellers published in 1885, Schoefft, Stromeyer and Heymann are listed as the chief sellers of photographs, though there is also ‘Sebah of Constantinople’ and Laroche and Co. Schoefft is recommended for ‘a good background for groups; also a fine collection of groups of natives and a few desert scenes, some of which are very striking’. (p. 27)

But while generally cheap and widely available, the photographs sold to tourists clearly reflected the world as a series of views, framed by the professional (often without leaving the studio) and his (very rarely ‘hers’!), artistic sensibilities and technological prowess. In the context of the, then developed world, and despite the rapidly expanding population of tourists drawn from the middle classes, taking one’s own photographs of a destination remained out of reach financially and in terms of technical and artistic skill, to a point where the development of a modern tourism as a social practice out-paced the technological developments of photography. This was a situation which was not to last long and the buying of photographs gave way to a taking of photographs particularly as George Eastman, the founder of the american company of kodak, offered the ‘kodak Brownie’ at a retail price of one dollar in 1900. This ‘point and shoot’ camera was a development of an earlier camera designed by Eastman and offered for sale in 1888 at the price of twenty dollars, along with the slogan: ‘you press the button we do the rest’. Despite having to return the camera to the factory to develop the prints in its first year of production some 13,000 were sold (I’anson 2000). The kodak Brownie when first offered in 1900, complete with a film roll for 15 cents, shipped over 150,000 (see <www.kodak.com>). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to detail the history and development of the camera (see for instance: Willsberger 1977; Wade 1979, West 2000) suffice to say that in line with the language used to advertise cameras since the ‘Brownie’, all the individual had to do was to ‘click’ or ‘snap’. This transfer of control and power from a relatively small group of ‘experts’ to an increasingly mobile mass was arguably the greatest single event in the shaping of tourist identity. While developments in ‘public’ transport technologies have clearly enabled people to travel, and ‘desti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Half Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Moments, Magic and Memories: Photographing Tourists, Tourist Photographs and Making Worlds
• 2 Imaging and Imagining Pueblo People in Northern New Mexico Tourism
• 3 Ancient Greek Theatres as visual Images of Greekness
• 4 The accidental Tourist: NGOs, Photography, and the Idea of africa
• 5 The Bulimic consumption of Pygmies: Regurgitating an Image of Otherness
• 6 Photographing Race: The discourse and Performance of Tourist Stereotypes
• 7 From Images to Imaginaries: Tourism advertisements and the Conjuring of Reality
• 8 The camera as Global vampire: The distorted Mirror of Photography in Remote Indonesia and Elsewhere
• 9 Re-viewing the Past: discourse and Power in Images of Prehistory
• 10 Entwined Histories: Photography and Tourism at the Great Barrier Reef
• 11 The Embodiment of Sociability through the Tourist Camera
• 12 Disposable Camera Snapshots: Interviewing Tourists in the Field
• 13 Connecting Cultural Identity and Place through Tourist Photography: American Jewish Youth on a First Trip to Israel
• 14 The Purloined eye: Revisiting the Tourist Gaze from a Phenomenological Perspective
• Index