Three Dimensions of Travel Photography

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1 Three Dimensions of Travel Photography An Exploration by Mildred Lau for Charles Barbour SOC 461: Sociology of Art University of Alberta 10. December 2008

2 Three Dimensions of Travel Photography Mildred Lau ( ) 1/7 In our ever-increasingly image-dominated society, few events and occasions are not documented with photos. But from no event are photos requested more often than vacations. People want to know where one has been and the things he did there: the vicarious experience of travel is second only to the real thing. The photographs are not objective in this regard, though. They also suggest what version of the travel experience the photographer intends to keep in memory and to share with others. 1. I Was Here: Travel Photography as Documentation In her essay The Image-World, 1 Susan Sontag criticizes the Chinese tendency to take posed instead of candid photographs, interpreting the Chinese view of the act of photography as a ritual that requires posing, and thus the consent of the photographed. She writes that to the Chinese, the ill of candid photography was depriving people and things of their right to pose, in order to look their best. Although the latter conclusion may be a somewhat perilous leap and the avoidance of candid photography certainly not endemic to Chinese culture, there is no doubt to me that photography is a ritual to many Chinese. If a human subject is to be in a photograph, he is to be posed. It is rare for an inanimate subject to be photographed alone; when one is, the subject is something of historical importance, and it is photographed straight on, centered, evenly lit, and in its entirety. Historical in this context does not have to be in the academic sense - as long as it has significance for family reputation or accomplishment, it can be considered historical. 1 Sontag, Susan. (1977). The Image-World in On Photography (pp ). New York: Picador.

3 Three Dimensions of Travel Photography Mildred Lau ( ) 2/7 This concept of documenting accomplishment can be extended to an understanding of typical Chinese tourist photography. There is an expression that is used frequently in Chinese: 到此一 遊, which means [I have] visited here, similar to the English I was here. The Chinese understanding of travel is that travelling to faraway places (such as foreign countries) is an accomplishment; to be able to make such a journey is because one is fortunate enough to do so. Therefore, photographic priority is on being able to prove (to others, or even to future progeny) that I was there. Photographs of the travelers standing in front of recognizable landmarks thus predominate, because it is not proof enough to merely take photographs of the of the scenery or of the activities. Recognition of the location is of key importance, and the human subject is to be placed in the foreground, expressing the joy that the fortune of travel brings. [The Chinese] do not want to see the world from an unusual angle, to discover new subjects. Photographs are supposed to display what has already been described, writes Sontag. Photography is documentation of the world, not interpretation of the world. And indeed, it is the documentation of one s experience that prevails. There is little room for aesthetics. To the Chinese, seeing the world means precisely that literally seeing it, rather than the rich experience of culture and lifestyle that may be implied when many others use the same phrase. Many are the Asian travel packages and tours that whisk tourists around from landmark to landmark and from cliché to cliché. For example, when I was on a five-day tour of Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto in Japan, it seemed to be all about the photo-ops and very little of the culture outside of the stereotypes. Here is Fuji-yama; here s a shrine; here s a castle; here s a shopping

4 Three Dimensions of Travel Photography Mildred Lau ( ) 3/7 mall (you can see the Tokyo Bridge from the windows in the back); let s eat at this shabu-shabu restaurant and this Chinese restaurant; let s take a ride on the Shinkansen bullet train. Before I was given the opportunity to travel to Finland on my own, whenever I brought up the suggestion of spending some time there, my family would suggest that we embark on a twoweek tour of Europe after I graduate from university. They felt that it was not proper for me to be determined to go all the way across the Atlantic just to visit one country. It was better worth the money if one was to 到此一遊 as many places as possible and brings home hundreds of photographs of things that were seen there not merely quantity over quality, but a different set of values. There are thousands of photographs in my family home s basement. No one remembers the occasion for some of them. It is customary, for example, upon visiting the Alberta Legislature as a tourist, to have a photo taken of oneself, standing and smiling broadly in front of the sandstone structure, with the building centered in the frame as though on a postcard. This is the epitome of 到此一遊. 2. Good Times: Travel Photography as Social Bonding Photography acts not only as a ritual for verifying a travel experience; it can also act as a ritual of social bonding. Unlike documentation photographs, here we have photos where the destination is not the important part of the composition, but the travelers, and what they are doing, are. The setting and location are merely backgrounds to the function of establishing or reinforcing friendships or group cohesion through the group members mutual appearance in the same photograph.

5 Three Dimensions of Travel Photography Mildred Lau ( ) 4/7 This practice of group photography necessarily leads to bringing people closer together as friends, because there is a social expectation that one will distribute copies of these photos to the other members of the group and thus maintain contact with them. As a social networking site, Facebook facilitates and promotes such social bonding through photography by providing a tagging function by which one can mark the people who appear in one s photographs. No longer must we exchange postal addresses in order to exchange photos ( Do I still recall this person s name a month after our experience? Which of these photos was he in? ), we only need to exchange names, and when given access to our friends photos, we can tag ourselves in them to remind the photographer of who we are. I often see advertisements for student-oriented tours of Europe or Cancun or Thailand (among other destinations), promising good times, good sights, and good friends. But rarely do I hear stories of or see photographs of the sights of the vacation it is more often that I hear of the interpersonal experiences and the meeting of new people. This poses the question: if the social bonding between fellow travelers is so important, what is the significance of the location? Perhaps the travel destination provides an excuse for group photography to occur, as though the presence of the sights in the background offsets the importance of the photograph to the in-group and making it more accessible to the out-group. 3. The Storyboard: Travel Photography as Documentary It is easy to interpret the documentary dimension of travel photography as the aesthetic dimension, since it conforms best to ideals of Western art: evocative or provoking, attention to

6 Three Dimensions of Travel Photography Mildred Lau ( ) 5/7 detail, the sublime. Sontag writes that there is beauty or at least interest in everything, seen with an acute enough eye, which justifies that all of reality is aestheticized for the camera. Photography is not left in the hands of professional artists, though. The democracy of the camera combined with the power of Jonathan Beller s cinematic imagination opens another way of looking at travel photography. In the documentary dimension, the taking of the photographs is seen as part of the process of making a film: the making of a storyboard. Photographic content in this dimension is not limited to the rigid and clichéd poses and framing of documentation photography, or to the pure interest in the candid human subject of social bonding photography. The goal here is storytelling, and the dynamic use of both posed and candid photos serves to heighten that effect. Cinematic imagination influences how we frame photographs: the end result is a sequence of photos that express a narrative in the style of a film. A sign on a scrapbooking supply shop in my hometown reads: Photos capture the moment. Scrapbooks tell the story. The handicraft of scrapbooking exploits the documentary use of photography. By juxtaposing photographs, text, and graphics, continuity and narrative are created. Just as in a film, there can be close-ups, pans, and action sequences. Focus can be directed to a part of an image by cutting around it or framing it decoratively. The photographs are no longer just photographs from my vacation but the story of my vacation. Throughout my anticipation and planning for my trip to Finland, I knew that it was to be a journey. It was a pilgrimage to a place that has captured my imagination for many years. When I

7 Three Dimensions of Travel Photography Mildred Lau ( ) 6/7 was there, sometimes there was so much happening around me that I could not stop taking photos; at other times I felt no such desire, despite interesting sights and interesting events. My priority, when I returned, was to make a scrapbook as quickly as possible, because it was the story of the journey that was the most important to me and what I wanted to remember most from the experience. As with the editing process in the film industry, more than half of my photos were left on the proverbial cutting room floor. 4. The Persistence of Memory Mostly because I traveled alone, I do not appear in the majority of photographs that I took during my month in Finland. Neither do my classmates (but that is due in part to not really wanting to establish friendships with them). What appears amid a token number of postcard-style and social gathering shots are photographs framed for their aesthetic qualities (whether posed or not), and a few miscellaneous curiosities. This distribution was very helpful for the construction of a scrapbook project. When I showed my painstakingly-prepared photo scrapbook to a number of friends, I noticed that different people looked at it in different ways. Those expecting documentation-type photos preferred not to read the captions and asked questions about what they could see in the photos. Those expecting a record of social bonding experiences asked about what I did and the people I met. Those expecting documentary photos read the captions and asked for more details on what I described in the captions. I wrote in my travel diary that

8 Three Dimensions of Travel Photography Mildred Lau ( ) 7/7 [my classmates] have gone places for the reason of photos of each other and friendship with their own kind. I went places to see my friends, to live their lives, and incidentally they show me around Rather than leave with memories of new friends, I left with memories of the land feelings that cannot be relived anywhere else on this earth because it is not so much whom I was with but where I was. But memories are distorted or forgotten over time, and our best reminders of the places we have been are still photographs because while the alteration of memories is usually unconscious, the manipulation of photographs is a conscious act. The nature of a set of tourist photographs determines the kind of memories one retains from his excursion and thus speaks about the person s values. While not mutually exclusive, the three purposes of travel photography that I have discussed documentation, social bonding, and documentary sometimes conflict when they enter into discussion. In all cases, the photographs reflect a Barthesian that-has-been mood of something lost and is no longer whether it is being in the presence of scenery seen in postcards or magazines, good times of friendship, or the moods, feelings, and stories of a different time and place.