Identity

BA (Hons.) Photographic Media Unit 01 Dissertation Final critical response

Robert Singleton BSc. FCII. FCILA. FUEDI ELAE. HND.

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Identity How photography and in particular travel photography informs notions of cultural identity

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Contents Introduction........................................................................................................................5 Travel as a Leisure Activity...............................................................................................7 A Matter of Identity..........................................................................................................10 The Authentic and the Sublime.......................................................................................13 Tourism Travel for Enlightenment and Entertainment....................................................18 The Vicarious Experience...............................................................................................21 Photographic Practice.....................................................................................................24 Interpretation...................................................................................................................36 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................42 Appendix..........................................................................................................................45 Bibliography.....................................................................................................................47

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Plates and Illustrations Illustration 1: Loutherbourg - The Spanish Armada - www.all-art.org...............................7 Illustration 2: Kate A Williams Travel Album c1875 – Library of Congress – www.loc.gov ...........................................................................................................................................8 Illustration 3: Ramses 11 smiting his foes - Abu Simbel Egypt http://s65.photobucket.com.............................................................................................12 Illustration 4: James Ward - Gordale Scar – www.tate.org.uk........................................13 Illustration 5: The Ascent of Mont Blanc- Auguste Bisson www.photographymuseum.com .....................................................................................14 Illustration 6: Carleton Watkins, Yosemite Falls (River View), 1861 Library of Congress www.loc.gov....................................................................................................................15 Illustration 7: Walking John Stewart – National Portrait Gallery – www.NPG.org.uk.....17 Illustration 8: Church of the Purification David Roberts c1849 taken from The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia ............................................................................18 Illustration 9: Samuel Bourne - Varenasi 1865 – www.photographymuseum.com........21 Illustration 10: Apollo flaying Marsyas Giovanni Stefano Danedi 1612-1690 Italy – www.all-art.org.................................................................................................................23 Illustration 11: Australian Tourism Poster - www.wherethebloodyhellareyou.com.........24 Illustration 12: Clearing Winter Storm - Ansel Adams – www.mastersofphotography.com .........................................................................................................................................26 Illustration 13: Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake - Ansel Adams - www.allposters.com .........................................................................................................................................26 Illustration 14: Avalanche in the Alps - Loutherbourg- www.all-art.org...........................27 Illustration 15: Charlie Waite - www.charliewaite.com....................................................28 Illustration 16: Acoma Pueblo by Edward Curtis – www.loc.gov....................................29 Illustration 17: Steve McCurry – taken from Path to Buddha..........................................30 Illustration 18: Sabastiao Salgado – taken from his book Africa....................................31 Illustration 19: William Eggleston www.pdnedu.com......................................................32 Illustration 20: Robert Frank Les Américains shs.westport.k12.ct.us/jwb/Collab/CivRts33 Illustration 21: Pisa - Martin Parr – taken from Small World...........................................34 Illustration 22: Turkey - Martin Parr - Small World – Scan from the book......................35 Illustration 23: Jeff Brouws - Approaching Nowhere – scan from the book...................35 Illustration 24: Earth rise William Anders 24 Dec 1968 - Apollo 8 Lunar orbit www.nasa.gov.................................................................................................................44 Illustration 25: Mostar - Bosnia - R Singleton..................................................................45 Illustration 26: Press centre Olympic down hill ski start Sarajevo - destroyed by Serbian troops – R Singleton........................................................................................................45 Illustration 27: Seascape Isle of Mull - R Singleton.........................................................46 Illustration 28: Petra - Jordan - R Singleton....................................................................46

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Introduction Since late Victorian times photography has formed an important part of the mass media. Indeed until it was superseded by the moving image in particular by television in the late 20th century it was the major component. During that same period there has been a massive reappraisal of cultural identity throughout the Western world and this has been documented by photographers.

Photography always carries at least a kernel of truth which holds it apart from other art forms in that even if the artwork is technically inferior or carries little intellectual weight it can none the less be of great interest or value by virtue of the subject matter it contains. That subject matter may not even be intentional on the part of the photographer, it could simply be background or accidental inclusions, but none the less could turn out to be important to historians or anthropologists in later times.

Photography is often misused, abused and manipulated but despite those limitations provided that we can trust the voracity of the author or source of the image it may provide the best record available of people, places and events which are outside our everyday experience. That often second-hand knowledge of the world outside our immediate experience is instrumental in forming our own understanding of who we are.

The world, in the era since the invention of photography, has undergone major economic change from the largely rural early Victorian period to the technologically

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advanced urban environment experienced by the majority of people today. It is therefore illuminating to examine the practice of documentary, anthropological and travel photography and note how the medium has been instrumental in forming notions of cultural identity.

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Travel as a Leisure Activity “l'infinnie immensité des espaces que j'ignore et qui m'ignorent” Pascal, Pensées The urge to travel is innate within the human species; but to travel simply for the experience requires wealth and leisure and hence was once only for an aristocratic elite. Travel as a routine, safe, frivolous and easy pastime for the masses only became possible since the industrial revolution.

Illustration 1: Loutherbourg - The Spanish Armada - www.all-art.org

In October 1805 Nelson defeated the French at Trafalgar with small wooden sailing ships which

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would have been recognizable to Francis Drake as similar to the vessels he commanded against the Spanish Armada some 200 years earlier. But, within the space of a few years everything changed. In 1824 the Stockton and Darlington Railway opened and at more or less the same time Niépce1 made his “View from the study window”. On the 12th of December 1844 the SS Great Britain was launched2 and within the space of just 40 years the speed and distance a person could travel had changed by a factor that would not be equalled until the development of reliable air transport in the 20th century. By the coming of the railways in the 1840's cameras were affordable to the wealthy middle classes and travel for leisure and the development of photography became intertwined.

Illustration 2: Kate A Williams Travel Album c1875 – Library of Congress – www.loc.gov

On the 1st of May 1952 the world's first tourist airfare was introduced on the North Atlantic 1 Niépce commenced his tests with his bitumen-coated tin plates in 1825 and the “View from the study window” was first shown to the Royal Society in 1827 2 An iron ship with a displacement of 3,675 tonnes powered by steam.

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route and the age of modern mass tourism began. It might have been imagined that the tourist photographers in this new mass market would follow a fresh paradigm but investigators 3 looking at travel photography discovered that everyone whether photographing for their own private album or with a view to commercial use follows a similar script, the picturesque, the primitive, the strange foreign customs.

3 The people in tourist brochures – Graham Dan – The Tourist Image: Myths and Myth Making in Tourism.

Edited by Tom Selwyn 1996 Page 17

A Matter of Identity “Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.”

Diane Arbus It may be counter intuitive but our concept of self and identity is not individual but is essentially defined by membership of a group and thus by reference to the other. Current thinking 4 suggests that an individual does not simply have one personal self but has several selves or identities each linked to a widening circle of friends and acquaintances or group memberships. Research demonstrates that an individual's behaviour, beliefs and even body weight is profoundly influenced by their social network5.

This may will be something of an over simplification. Writing in New Scientist Rita Carter 6 explains how her research shows that all people have multiple identities or multiple personalities.

We sometimes think of multiple personalities as being a symptom of

schizophrenia but in fact when you consider the position more carefully it is apparent that everyone invokes different personalities or learned behaviours to help them cope with different aspects of their lives. The businessman making deals at work is a very different person to when 4 Taifel and H Turner J. C. (1986) The social identity theory of inter group behaviour.

5 Researchers from Harvard and the University of California, San Diego, reviewed a database of 12,067 densely interconnected people. - The study's authors suggest that obesity isn't just spreading; rather, it may be contagious between people, like a common cold. - According to their analysis, when a study participant's friend became obese, that first participant had a 57% greater chance of becoming obese himself. In pairs of people in which each identified the other as a close friend, when one person became obese the other had a 171% greater chance of following suit. "You are what you eat isn't the end of the story," says study co-author James Fowler, a political scientist at UC San Diego. "You are what you and your friends eat." - July 26 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

6 Issue 2412 New Scientist 13 September 2003 – Fractured Minds – Normally, certain cognitive faculties – memory, self-recognition, conciousness, sensation, intention, action – are bundled together, giving us a sense of singular and continuous identity in a single stream of existence. In multiple personality and other dissociative states, these strands of self are experience separately.

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he is the father playing with his children in the park. The problem with schizophrenics is that when they change from one role/personality to another they lack awareness of their other selves.

In the context under discussion, travel, the individual's identity is determined by their relationship to the abroad., in essence in order to feel truly British, English or Scottish etc it is necessary to have a view of those foreigners who do not share the same attributes. From the earliest days people have used text and images to identify those differences and the comparisons made are not necessarily always favourable.

The members of the group must always be

considered superior over all but it can be conceded that the foreign has some attributes which the group desires to emulate. For example an Italian may have a better taste in clothes or design, a Frenchman may have a better appreciation of food and wine but essentially neither could ever be English.

Still there can be no appreciation of the other without some form of intercourse and therefore travel and the reporting of adventures are significant themes in human art and literature.

Pictorial representation does not always survive the ravages of time and can be subject to diverse interpretation but ancient oral and written histories frequently record the exploits of heroes who left the group to visit the outside world.

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Illustration 3: Ramses 11 smiting his foes - Abu Simbel Egypt http://s65.photobucket.com

The urge to document the interaction between the known and the foreign remains important to this day and nowadays is an important use of photography, if anything the importance of photography in defining identity is increasing. The rise of Web 2 resources such as Flikr and Face Book emphasise that an individual's importance or status is defined by membership of a group, albeit virtual, which now demands the posting of images to a social networking site.

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The Authentic and the Sublime “There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief without the help of any other argument.”

Thomas Gray7 Early in the nineteenth century romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge espoused the importance of the rugged landscape. Places where nature made man feel small and insignificant, awed before the noble forces of nature, a feeling akin to a religious experience. The sublime8.

Illustration 4: James Ward - Gordale Scar – www.tate.org.uk 7 In 1739 the poet Thomas Gray engaged on a walking trip of the Alps wrote of his experiences.

8 In 1712 the 200CE treatise on the sublime by Longinus was first translated into English and had considerable impact on the artists and poets of the time.

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The search for landscapes and places of sufficient grandeur to induce the sublime became important to both travellers and artists and the coming of the railways opened up vast areas of wilderness to them. In Britain the call was answered by Turner with his violent seascapes of storms and wrecks and James Ward with his awe inspiring depiction of Gordale Scar. In Europe by de Loutherbourg with his An Avalanche in the Alps. Photography followed suit with images of exploration and endeavour a foremost example being Auguste Rosalie Bisson's photographs of Mont Blanc beween 1859 and 18649.

Illustration 5: The Ascent of Mont Blanc- Auguste Bisson - www.photographymuseum.com

Whilst in Europe the scenery was already well known that was not the case in America. When the Civil War ended in 1865 the great push west began unveiling the vast deserts, canyons and mountains of the interior, the very epitome of the sublime.

9 The project produced stunning images but was a financial disaster forcing his firm into bankruptcy in 1864.

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As the country expanded westwards and wagon trails, roads and railways pushed out there was a race to document the new territories. Landscape painters10 played their part but for all their cumbersome size and need for chemistry and darkrooms the cameras were quicker.

In 1850, almost a hundred years before Ansel Adams, Carleton Watkins made the trek from San Fransisco to Yosemite not just with a camera but with a mammoth 20” x 24” wet plate collodion11 camera to photograph the valley which was to become for America more or less the definition of the sublime.

Illustration 6: Carleton Watkins, Yosemite Falls (River View), 1861 Library of Congress www.loc.gov

This universal association of landscape with religious experience is evident from the location

10 In 1869 Thomas Morgan accompanied by photographer William Henry Jackson were engaged by The Union Pacific to document the new line and were in part responsible for Yellowstone becoming a National Park.

11 Collodion is a solution of nitrocellulose in ether or acetone. It was discovered in about 1846 by the French chemist and writer Louis Ménard.

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and design of archaeological sites the world over, including cultures in South America and the Antipodes which flourished without contact with the West12.

In China the power of mountain scenery had long been recognized, and stylised landscape painting was a cherished art. This culture of reverence for the natural landscape was taken up by the Japanese who considered certain mountains to be sacred but more importantly they developed a love of pure unadulterated stone and rocky outcrops. These were often bound with shime-nawa ropes to indicate their sacred character and thus identified as the abode of a deity.

In the mid-1600s Sankin Kotai laws obliged Daimyo Lords to spend a half of each year in the capital Edo and the remaining six months in their own domains. A by-product of this was the development of a well maintained set of roads and the enforced tourism lead to the development of a new garden style13 known as Shukkei or garden for strolling. A predefined circuit of the garden takes the visitor past a succession of “meisho� - faithful re-creations on a smaller scale of actual famous sights and geographical features.

We can see therefore that concepts of travel, landscape, foreign experience and indeed the sublime are not purely occidental. Indeed the opposite is probably true. Wordsworth and other romantics were influenced in their deliberations by contact with Walking John Stewart14 and there was a general interest amongst the upper classes in things Chinese and Japanese.

12 Classic tourist/archaeological sites would include Uluru in central Australia which was discovered by the western world in 1872 and Macchu Picchu in Peru first seen in 1911.

13 The aesthetic of Japanese gardens was introduced to the English-speaking community by Josiah Conder's Landscape Gardening in Japan ((Kelly & Walsh) 1893.

14 John Stewart 1747-1842 Clerk with the East India Co in Madras walked home via Persia Abyssinia Arabia Africa and most European countries meeting Wordsworth in Paris in 1792 shortly after the September massacres. Author of Travels over the most interesting parts of the Globe (London, 1790).

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Josiah Wedgewood15 was inspired to create bone china and his son16 was involved in the early investigations which led to photography.

Illustration 7: Walking John Stewart – National Portrait Gallery – www.NPG.org.uk

15 Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795), was born in Burslem, Staffordshire, in the heart of the English potteries. He served his apprenticeship as a potter before setting up his own business in 1759.

16 Tom Wedgwood explored different ways of using chemicals to fix an image photographically. He was not successful in creating a permanent image, but his investigations contributed to the development of photography in the nineteenth century.

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Tourism Travel for Enlightenment and Entertainment “Taste is a gate keeping structure that enforces class boundaries” Bourdieu There was a time when no gentleman's education could be considered complete without making the grand tour17. This was no holiday, it was a serious undertaking requiring considerable wealth and stamina, accompanied by his tutor and other servants he would learn French, study classical history, art and music and use his expertise with water colours to record his trip.

Illustration 8: Church of the Purification David Roberts c1849 taken from The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia 17 The term as we use it refers to the British aristocracy but the wealthy of most other northern European nations engaged in similar trips. Probable first use of the phrase - Richard Lassels – An Italian Voyage (1670) Page 35

The modern tourist may no longer search for the sublime, or be intent on preparing himself for life in the diplomatic corps like his 18th century counterpart, but the urge to travel essentially for its own sake appears inherent. Most people, with the time and means to do so now engage in recreational travel and in consequence of its economic importance this has become an active area of study. The travelling public choose to divide themselves into two broad classes; the tourist and the traveller which division in turn gives rise to philosophical debate as to the nature of authenticity.

Barthes and Baudrillard conclude that tourism, as we now understand it, is a manifestation of the post-modern18 because by the 1960s Modernist social changes had broken down societal structures creating a public sense of alienation and unease. Travel then in the sense of travel for pleasure and entertainment has become associated with the quest for authenticity.

The traveller/tourist division occurs because this quest takes two interdependent forms; the quest for the authentic other and the quest for the authentic good time. The tension between these two quests is central to the understanding of tourism.

This tension can be briefly examined by considering some crude stereotypes: we have on one hand our Sun reading tourist seeking the authentic good time often abbreviated to sun, sand and sex and on the other hand we have our Guardian reading intellectual who considers himself to be a traveller seeking an authentic experience of the other, the culture vulture.

18 The post-modern state is essentially one of dissatisfaction, consumption for its own sake and an hedonistic pursuit of pleasure is in some way unsatisfying. In consequence modern civilisation has come to believe that reality and authenticity reside elsewhere, either in some golden historical period or in other cultures perhaps more exotic but always purer and unspoilt.

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It is said that most people are disappointed by the holiday experience because of the tension between these persona, no-one is exclusively one or the other, and the realisation that the authenticity sought whether the good time or the experience is ultimately fake.

Whether we visit Las Vegas, Disneyland or an exotic native village there comes the eventual realisation that the authentic tourist experience is inauthentic; it has been staged.

Our traveller thus sets foot on the merry-go-round of unspoilt places, once a destination becomes a site and is presented to him it is inauthentic, this leads our traveller to move on searching for a new and unspoilt location.

Our tourist is not immune from the same problem. Although the authentic good time may appears mindless in fact it relies on novelty. Once a bar, club, spa or luxury hotel becomes common knowledge it is no longer cool.

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The Vicarious Experience “What I think is so extraordinary about the photograph is that we have a piece of paper with this image adhered to it, etched on it, which interposes itself into the plane of time that we are actually in at that moment. Even if it comes from as far back as 150 years ago, or as recently as yesterday, or a minute before as a Polaroid color photograph, suddenly you bring it into your experience. You look at it, and all around the real world is humming, buzzing and moving, and yet in this little frame there is stillness that looks like the world. That connection, that collision, that interfacing, is one of the most astonishing things we can experience.�

Joel Meyerowitz Travel is not unlike cookery.

While we may enjoy the experience and the results of the

endeavour most of the time we are content to watch it on television or read books, magazines and brochures to experience the pleasure vicariously. This is not a new phenomenon, throughout history those who had the means collected landscape paintings or built gardens or indeed entire houses in styles to remind them either of their foreign travels or what they had been told about other cultures.

Illustration 9: Samuel Bourne - Varenasi 1865 – www.photographymuseum.com

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The invention of photography brought an entirely new dimension to this, through the remarkable accuracy of a lens people could not only see sites from around the world but see them in 3D. It is remarkable how quickly stereoscopic photography developed. Only 30 years or so after the first viable photographic process Oliver Wendell Holmes 19 wrote in the July 1861 edition of the Atlantic Monthly of a stereo-photographic trip across the Atlantic. This tale is not one of his personal endeavour visiting the sites and setting up his equipment but rather he was writing a lengthy review somewhat in the manner of the TV review we see in our Sunday papers but his concerning sets of stereoscopic slides of the sites and wonders of Europe available to collectors in New England.

Even in 1861 he was concerned about authenticity.

His article discusses the practise of

tampering with photographs and one of the virtues he sees in the stereoscopic process, referred to quaintly as sun-sculpture, is that because they require two images, one for each eye, they are virtually impossible to retouch without the stereoscope displaying the handiwork in graphic 3D.

His second concern also involved novelty. He was worried that any one famous site could only be photographed a few times before it was effectively used up. He illustrated his point by reference to a Greek myth involving the god Apollo20.

19 The article entitled Sun painting and sun sculpture a stereoscopic trip across the Atlantic Is available online in the archives of the Atlantic Monthly which are maintained in the library of Cornell University HTTP://cdl.library.cornell.edu 20 He likened The Flaying of Marsyas to the act of photography.

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Illustration 10: Apollo flaying Marsyas Giovanni Stefano Danedi 1612-1690 Italy – www.all-art.org

J K Huysman in his 1884 novel A Debours discusses a second aspect. The Duc des Esseintes plans a trip from Paris to London. He enjoys studying the timetables, he reads about the sights he will visit, the people he will meet, the food & drink he will experience and then having packed his cases and set off for the station realises that the impression of London he has created in his mind is such that reality is bound to disappoint and he returns home resolving never to travel again.

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Photographic Practice Victorian concerns regarding the disparity between expectation and reality still inform our view of travel today. Travel agents and advertisers display images of such perfection that the reality is guaranteed to be a disappointment. Through the medium of TV, film and indeed the nightly news we have come to recognize almost every city and culture in the world, so like the Duc we have created a fantasy world which we know does not exist but we nonetheless cling to the myth.

Illustration 11: Australian Tourism Poster - www.wherethebloodyhellareyou.com

Graham Dan studied tourist brochures21 and found that almost a quarter of images used did not contain people at all, 60% pictured tourists and just 16% showed the locals and in the majority of those cases they were accompanied by tourists.

21 The tourist image, myths and myth making in tourism – edited by Tom Selwyn 1996 Page 47

Photographers are not immune to these cultural pressures. The question therefore becomes can photography ever document authenticity or does it simply record the photographers own mythology? It is said that more than 90% of all the cameras that have existed since the invention of photography are in use today, and by the rather broad definition adopted here a very large proportion of them are making photographs which could be considered travel photography.

Selection is therefore inevitable and without denigrating the many millions of people happily making holiday snaps, I have restricted my investigation to photographers generally accepted as pre-eminent practitioners and whose work is sufficiently well known to inform debate.

It is not clear when, but some time during the 20th century the original concept of the sublime disappeared.

It may be the erosion of language or the decline in organised religion but

nowadays sublime seems to be used to describe outstanding beauty or elegance and similarly awe-inspiring has become debased to mean wonderful or beautiful rather than their original meaning of terror in the face of nature.

Landscape photographers naturally gravitate to an idealised almost romantic view of nature and their work comes closest to the 19th-century concept. Ansel Adams22 in his seminal views of Yosemite and his “Clearing Winter Storm� seeks not to terrify us with the violence of the storm we see abating but rather to captivate us with the beauty of the clouds and landscape revealed in the rays of light shining through the retreating mists.

22Adams and his ilk were important in the establishment of a national parks movement in the USA and in protecting such areas of unspoilt wilderness for future generations. However always there is the dilemma that in order to protect an area of wilderness it is necessary to attract visitors to see it, partly to validate the effort of protection and to generate the economic wherewithal to carry out that protection.

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Illustration 12: Clearing Winter Storm - Ansel Adams – www.mastersofphotography.com

Illustration 13: Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake - Ansel Adams www.allposters.com

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In essence the photograph is similar in concept to his quiet night time photograph of a snowclad Mount McKinley. Taken in the gentle July light of the midnight sun the image is a masterful display of tones from the black shadows in the foreground over the luminous lake reflecting the brightness of the night sky and on to the detail in the snow of the distant mountain outlined against the black horizon. The peaceful mood is entirely different to de Loutherbourg's Avalanche referenced earlier.

Illustration 14: Avalanche in the Alps - Loutherbourg- www.all-art.org

Two photographers active in Britain towards the end of the 20th century Joe Cornish and Charlie Waite have earned reputations for high-quality landscape photography. Like Adams they seek not to terrify their audience with the power of nature but to captivate them with the spectacular beauty and preternatural colours associated with wilderness areas at particular times of the day and year.

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Illustration 15: Charlie Waite - www.charliewaite.com

In an earlier age less affected by postmodernism's distaste for the representational they may have been considered to be artists. They are certainly accomplished photographers but changes in artistic sensibility consigns them to the role of illustrators. None the less like Adams they provide imagery much used by the National Parks and National Trust to both protect and popularise wilderness and heritage areas in the UK.

They accord closely to the popular aesthetic for the picturesque and they profit from it. This is one element of the formula which now defines travel photography.

The second element of travel photography is the seeking of authenticity which as Baudrillard noted is rooted in the primitive and exotic and in a life which is entirely at a remove from the commercialised western grind.

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Illustration 16: Acoma Pueblo by Edward Curtis – www.loc.gov

In the past we could look to practitioners such as Edward Curtis and his carefully collected studies of the dress, culture and dwellings of Native Americans. In the present day we can compare and contrast two competing styles. Steve McCurry is a regular photographer for National Geographic and as a journalist has produced number of travel books.

In The Path to Buddha McCurry documents a Tibetan pilgrimage. Tibet has a troubled history throughout the 20th century having been absorbed into Communist China and the native peoples oppressed and controlled by Han immigrants from the south. It would therefore be relatively straightforward to present an image of Tibet as a country under military rule and dictatorship.

However that is not the picture that Steve McCurry gives us.

McCurry is a journalist and he is well aware of the reality on the ground and the tension between the occupied country and the “authentic” Tibet is explored carefully in the introduction to the book. He also comments that although rural Tibet may lack modern conveniences of electricity

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and such like the rich and ancient culture cannot be described as primitive.

Illustration 17: Steve McCurry – taken from Path to Buddha

However the images which form the majority of the book are essentially presented unmoderated by text being lightly captioned with simple factual descriptions such as Monk at the Jakhang Temple Lhasa.

The quiet and softly lit detailed portraits of individual men and women in predominantly traditional dress show the people as individuals and the commonly adopted pose where the subject gazes directly into camera simultaneously evokes a feeling of familiarity. However we are left in no doubt of their exotic nature due to the colour and entirely foreign style of their dress.

The impression given by the book is not one of a lifestyle or culture under threat but of some kind of Shangri-La where peaceful and colourfully dressed people live at one with their environment, customs and rituals.

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Reading McCurry's book is no preparation for Africa by SebastiĂŁo Salgado.

Africa is a continent not a subjugated province like Tibet but there are nonetheless similarities.

The apartheid regimes of the South have been overthrown, the economies of many of the countries are improving and there is a hope of a brighter future. However there remain problems of poverty, civil war and disease and that is the Africa Salgado gives us. Over 300 pages of black-and-white photographs, almost all showing soldiers, mutilated victims, dead bodies, famine, disease, poverty and political unrest. There are few uplifting photographs to relieve the horror.

Part of the book documents nomadic tribes tending their cattle and he includes spectacular wildlife and landscape pictures. However the juxtaposition with the horrors of war clouds your interpretation of what could, following a different edit, be an optimistic book. Viewing the pictures of the happy girls looking after their cows you are left wondering if around the corner there is a truck of armed guerrillas about to reap some appalling act upon them.

Illustration 18: Sabastiao Salgado – taken from his book Africa Page 61

In these photographs we find Orwell's doublethink23, our perception that the foreigner, the other, is both quaintly exotic, contently living in touch with an age-old wisdom we have lost in the West and at the same time is a brutal savage capable of the most appalling inhumanity, to be feared and pitied.

Into this conundrum walk a number of photographers who ask us to challenge our clichéd view of authenticity and say forget that this is what it is really like.

Illustration 19: William Eggleston www.pdnedu.com 23 The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them . . . .

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth – George Orwell – Nineteen Eighty Four Page 63

To some extent inspired by William Eggleston, with his artfully naive coloured snapshots of America, and perhaps by Les Americains a journalistic record of the people of the USA by then Swiss tourist Robert Frank, Martin Parr turned his documentary skills to examining the tourist experience.

Illustration 20: Robert Frank Les Américains shs.westport.k12.ct.us/jwb/Collab/CivRts

In his books the Last Resort, Think of England and Small World he photographed the tourist experience of the holiday resort, the cultural site or the enjoyment of the English “day out”.

Aping the artless casual composition of the amateur snapshot he has subverted the picture. The tourist might pose Aunt Bessie before the pyramids to memorialise their time before the cultural artefact but Parr pokes fun at their experience, showing the crowds of people waiting to stand in the same place, the litter, the touts; thereby subordinating the event/site and hence highlighting the general misery and hassle of modern travel.

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Illustration 21: Pisa - Martin Parr – taken from Small World

However Parr's somewhat cruel jibes are in a strange way just a different manifestation of the original myth. Parr's work is rooted in the English class system and as he says freely in his lectures he is doggedly middle-class. He tells us in his words that he turns his camera on the middle class at play to document their foibles. However when we look at the images brought together in “Small World� we can see that Parr's class consciousness and the travel dichotomy of tourist v travel come together. It may well be very true that the middle-class are tourists just like the lower orders but they like to believe that they are on a higher cultural plane, that they are the travellers. In photographing the tourist on the donkey videoing the experience he is invoking that class revulsion.

It's rather like the aristocracy looking down on the nouveaux-riche and bemoaning their lack of taste. Parr has simply discovered a different other to stereotype.

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Illustration 22: Turkey - Martin Parr - Small World – Scan from the book

Another alternative view of the world is given by Jeff Brouws in his book Approaching Nowhere.

He is perhaps more faithful to Eggleston and his pictures of roads crossing empty wastelands, abandoned cars, rundown motels, empty lots and such like show us that the world we aspire to travel to is not all picturesque and uplifting. On the contrary reality includes much that is drab and uninspiring even boring.

Illustration 23: Jeff Brouws - Approaching Nowhere – scan from the book

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Interpretation “Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be” Duane Michals - 1966 In truth we are not naïve. We are knowingly complicit in formulating the myth and are willing to be deceived. The meaning of an image is never absolute24. It is influenced by the photographer's choices, viewpoint, lens, moment of capture and once made is filtered via the editorial process and once displayed, subject to mediation through the eye of the beholder.

Various philosophers25 have considered how the culture26 of the observer affects the observer's experience and how they read or decode images.

The topic also interests anthropologists and a number of ethnographic surveys have been carried out. Two of them, Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins27, conducted detailed research into how 24 Mass media is a powerful factor which influences our beliefs, attitudes,and the values we have of ourselves and others as well as the world surrounding us. Media does not merely communicate and reflect reality in a more or less truthful way. Instead, media production entails a complex process of negotiation, processing, and reconstruction. It not only offers us something to see, but also shapes the way in which we see by creating shared perceptual modes. Media messages are used and interpreted by audiences according to their own cultural, social, and individual circumstances. This interpretation is influenced by a variable referred to as special media logic. This entails a way of processing the information of what is mediated, where the main components include the type of content and the grammar of the medium. For example, media logic may include organization and physical characteristics such as camera angles or picture sizes, time structure of the coverage, as well as the use of special images and symbols (e.g., Duncan & Brummet, 1987; Fenton, 1995).

25 For example Roland Barthes – Camera lucida 1980 26 Enterprising kinship – 1990 – Strathern M “Culture...consists in the way analogies are drawn between things, in the way certain thoughts are used to think others“ 27 Reading National Geographic 1993 University of Chicago press ISBN 0-226-49724-0 The enquiry did not involve travel images made within the United States or Europe and importantly the study was undertaken before the so called war on terror commenced.

The National geographic is something of a special case. There is no other comparable magazine anywhere in the world. Being originally a publication of the National Geographic Society for members it has a scientific and learned bias. It also enjoys special cultural and tax privileges within the United States which effectively determine its editorial stance. Nonetheless the magazine is very widely read in the USA and at the time the Page 71

American readers of the National Geographic magazine respond to nonwestern images. They also investigated how the philosophy of the National Geographic affected the choice of and style of the images published.

One of its guiding editorial principles is that of balance which in the case of National Geographic does not mean giving equal weight to opposing factions but rather to simply present unarguable objective facts and to avoid the unpleasant28. Racial politics in the United States further demand that not too great a proportion of the photographs or articles in any one issue concern people of dark skin. The editors draw this distinction, The press seeks the “decisive moment”, a single image which sums up the entire story. National Geographic seeks the “indecisive moment”

29

an image displaying general truths and allowing a more nuanced

interpretation.

The final editorial influence on the content of images is that no images are made at all if editorial sanction is not given to the expedition.

When the researchers reviewed coverage of the

nonwestern world they discovered that the stories featured disproportionately favoured areas with light-skinned populations such as Latin America, the Middle East and the Pacific Islands survey was undertaken in the late 80s there were approx 11 million subscribers and bearing in mind the ubiquitous presence of the magazine in doctor's and dentist's waiting rooms and the fact that it is subscribed to by almost every school and college in the United States the readership of the magazine is many times that figure.

The period of research came shortly after the end of the Vietnam war and during a period of tremendous social unrest in the States mainly of racial origin and these form the contextual background to the study.

28 An example quoted by the researchers concerned the case of a photographer covering the Olympics in South Korea who took the opportunity to photograph a student demonstration and its violent suppression. The magazine editorial staff refused to publish the photographs on the grounds that whilst the incidents actually occurred to publish them would give a distorted image of what life in Korea was really like by giving undue prominence to the suppression of opposition.

29 A similar editorial policy lay behind the choice of images in the “Family of Man” exhibition in 1955 which subsequently travelled the world. This approach was criticised by Barthes in his review stating “it serves to suppress the determining weight of history”. He said it is true that children are always born but what does that matter, he asked, compared to whether or not children were born with or without difficulty, or whether or not they are threatened by a high mortality rate, or whether or not such and such a future is open to them.

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with an under representation compared with population and importance of Africa, India and China.

The issues and topics covered by National Geographic are partly determined by actual scientific considerations and newsworthy events but the contents of the magazine are also based on extensive market research. The editors know that if the balance of stories does not meet with the reader's expectations then subscriptions are cancelled and they receive letters of complaint.

Therefore the content of National Geographic reflects not the actual nature of the world outside America's shores, but the world Americans wish was outside their shores 30 and influenced by questions of race31 and class.

Lutz and Collins researched viewers responses to the magazine. They selected an audience partly to reflect the demographic32 of National Geographic subscribers, but they also included other social groups who may come across the magazine in schools, libraries, waiting rooms and the like. These people were shown a selection of images culled from the mid-70s to the mid-80s, which at the time of the research were relatively contemporary, so that they would not 30 Market research has show that the most popular articles concern the polar regions. they being roughly twice as popular as all other nonwestern articles combined. The least popular are stories on Africa with the least popular articles of all concerning various incidents of famine and conflict in Africa.

The only African stories which achieved any significant level of audience approval involved wildlife and an article on Botswana which achieved popularity was significant because it contained only pictures of animals.

31 Race Writing and Difference – H, L, Gates – University of Chicago Press – 1985 Race is a trope of ultimate irreducible difference between cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific belief systems which more often than not also have fundamentally opposed economic interests, it is a trope that is particularly dangerous because it pretends to be an objective term of classification. Social groups engaged in struggle define racial boundaries in the context of that struggle and then invoke biology in post-hoc justification of the boundaries they have drawn 32 1987 Study of Media and Markets – Simmons The magazine is predominantly read by a white upper-middle-class audience. More than 30% of the readers are of the highest two social classes compared with only 17% in the general public. 33% are college graduates compared with 18% in the general population. However some 43% of readers have not attended college and the readership includes a significant number of people with aspirations to knowledge and a higher class position.

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be interpreted as historical documents. The images were shown out of context without either the magazine text or captions to aid the viewers in forming their responses. The chosen people were then interviewed.

It is clear that the magazine is not read in great depth. Only 81% of the sample claimed to look at all the photographs and only 34% say they read most of the stories. The vast majority of the photographs were liked, but of the 20 images selected at random for the trial two stood out. The first was a photograph of a grandfather, wearing a turban and holding his smiling grandchild.

The second was of a young female Israeli soldier cleaning an automatic rifle. The first was by far and away the most popular photograph and the second was the most unpopular.

Favourable responses recorded were firstly “the pleasure of knowing that there is something different something more natural and peaceful” and people expressed a liking for pictures which appeared to show some form of universal human value to which they could relate their everyday life. One New Yorker responded to the picture of the Indian man holding his granddaughter “it shows that human values are basically the same around the world and that even when there is desolation or perhaps a war or hunger that the spirit is there despite all those adversities, and that the bond of love is important to young and old people as a necessary part of life” There was also a preference for colourful images invoking good feelings and a sense of peace whilst other people judged the results on aesthetic values33.

33 Amateur Photography: the organizational maintenance of an aesthetic code – Natural Audiences Schwartz D. B. and Griffin M 1987 In research on amateur camera clubs they found that their members judge photographs by pictorialist standards, valuing beauty above all else. They also prefer pictures which follow classic design rules such as the use of strong diagonals and those which can be easily understood or have an immediate impact. They conclude that there is an homogenisation of photo-aesthetic codes outside the art world Page 77

Reasons for disliking photographs were that the images were associated with conflict destruction or turmoil or that they were uninformative or difficult to understand34. Hence we can see how a picture of an attractive young girl in uniform in what was at the time an active war zone became the most unpopular photograph of the set.

This issue of selection and popular opinion informs or perhaps more properly influences the decisions of curators whether of exhibitions, books or any form of publication. In the summer of 2007 the Lowry Centre in Salford hosted an exhibition entitled the “Myth of the North”35 which explored the concepts of cliché and stereotype by reference to the museum's archive of TS Lowry paintings and a variety of photographic exhibits including film and television stills.

The generally good reception for the exhibition provides confirmation if such were needed that the public at large, who make up the audience for travel photography, are conservative in their tastes and require that the images presented conform to the accepted stereotype. Furthermore they show the stereotype is not essentially external to the people or practice portrayed. The inhabitants of Northern England know that life during the early 20th century was difficult and the living and working conditions were hard. None the less when they attend the exhibition or buy the books of nostalgic photographs they expect to see plucky and cheerful individuals showing the requisite humour in the face of any such problems.

34 41% cited the suggestion of conflict or violence, 32% difficult to decipher, 8% that the picture invoked bad feelings 35 The exhibition curator Bill Longshaw features many well known and respected photographers and journalists including works by:- Shirley Baker, Colin Jones, Jack Hulme, Tom Brooks, Martin Parr, John Bulman, Denis Thorpe, J H Spender, Ian Beezley, John Gay, Tony Ray Jones The majority of the images come from the 60s and 70s but Spenders work with Mass Observation is pre-war and the latest piece in the exhibition is taken from Martin Parr's Last Resort series sometime around 1983.

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Conclusion “Everything is good in leaving the hands of the Creator of Things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.�

Rousseau 1762 We, the consumers of travel imagery understand and view the world through stereotypes and myths and are these myths we have created ourselves. They are partly to some extent at least a product of mass media and photography plays a major role in their development.

Websites or other media established by tourist departments for governments in disparate countries across the world choose the images they use to portray themselves largely conform to stereotype. Images from Spain show seascapes and holiday makers on the beach or perhaps a mediaeval town. From Egypt we get a picture of the pyramids and India gives us the Taj Mahal.

They display that which they wish to sell.

The other media which commonly show pictures from abroad are the news media. However the old adage runs true and good news is no news. So far as the news media are concerned a country will not be shown unless there is a war, famine or something terrible has happened.

These media together therefore inform our understanding and the knowledge we gain from them becomes tacit and forms our common sense understanding of the world around us. As we saw earlier this then goes on to affect how other media we chose for entertainment portray those same places. The National Geographic is constrained by its audience not to show distressing

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scenes and to under represent disliked places such as Africa. Travelogues on the television are either thinly disguised advertisements or consumer shows for hotels and resorts or perhaps entertainments whereby presenters such as Michael Palin show us the amusing antics of foreigners. Very rarely indeed we are presented with a objective documentary.

Regrettably it seems the answer is that we the consumers of photography exist in a state of denial. We know that the world is rapidly becoming industrialised that the majority of the population of the planet live in cities, that everyone regardless of nationality toils long and hard simply to make ends meet. None the less our post-modern angst and the newly fashionable worship of nature and the environment means that we have once again bought into Rousseau's myth of the noble savage and we seek, nay demand that our media and image makers show us a better life.

Despite all of this it is still possible for a single photograph to change forever all our notions of the foreign and indeed even the notion of what it means to be a human being. In December 1968 the world was in revolt, the Vietnam war was raging, there were anti war and race riots in the USA, rioting in Northern Ireland, Paris, Germany and in Czechoslovakia Soviet tanks were on the streets and on 24 December William Anders36 made this image.

36 William Anders was one of the crew of Apollo 8 – The first manned vehicle to orbit the moon.

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Illustration 24: Earth rise William Anders 24 Dec 1968 - Apollo 8 Lunar orbit - www.nasa.gov

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Appendix

Illustration 25: Mostar - Bosnia - R Singleton

Illustration 26: Press centre Olympic down hill ski start Sarajevo - destroyed by Serbian troops – R Singleton Page 87

Illustration 27: Seascape Isle of Mull - R Singleton

Illustration 28: Petra - Jordan - R Singleton

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Index A Debours................................................45 Africa........................................................61 Ansel Adams......................................29, 49 Antipodes.................................................31 Approaching Nowhere.............................69 armed guerrillas.......................................61 Avalanche................................................27 awe-inspiring............................................49 Barthes.....................................................37 Baudrillard..........................................37, 55 Carleton Watkins......................................29 Catherine Lutz..........................................71 Charlie Waite...........................................53 Civil War...................................................27 class consciousness................................67 Coleridge..................................................25 Daimyo Lords...........................................31 decisive moment......................................73 economic..................................................37 Edward Curtis..........................................57 Flikr..........................................................23 foreign......................................................23 Gordale Scar............................................27 Graham Dan............................................47 grand tour.................................................35 identity......................................................19 industrial revolution..................................13 J K Huysman............................................45 James Ward.............................................27 Jane Collins.............................................71 Jeff Brouws..............................................69 Joe Cornish..............................................53 Josiah ......................................................33 landscape paintings.................................41 Last Resort,..............................................65 Longinus...................................................25 Lowry Centre............................................79 market research.......................................75 Martin Parr...............................................65 mass tourism............................................17 meisho......................................................31

Michael Palin............................................83 Modernist.................................................37 Myth of the North.....................................79 National Geographic..........................57, 73 National Parks..........................................55 NiĂŠpce......................................................15 nouveaux-riche........................................67 Orwell.......................................................63 post-modern.............................................37 Racial politics...........................................73 recreational trave.....................................37 recreational travel....................................37 religious experience.................................29 Robert Frank............................................65 Rousseau.................................................83 Sankin Kotai.............................................31 schizophrenia...........................................19 SebastiĂŁo Salgado...................................61 Shangri-La...............................................59 shime-nawa..............................................31 Shukkei....................................................31 Small World..............................................65 social network..........................................19 SS Great Britain.......................................15 stereoscopic photography........................43 Steve McCurry.........................................57 Stockton and Darlington Railway.............15 sun-sculpture...........................................43 The Duc des Esseintes............................45 the sublime...............................................37 The sublime.............................................25 Think of England......................................65 Thomas Gray...........................................25 Tibet ........................................................57 tourist.......................................................37 Trafalgar...................................................13 Travel agents...........................................47 traveller....................................................37 Travelogues.............................................83 TS Lowry..................................................79 Turner.......................................................27 Page 97

wagon trails..............................................29 Walking John Stewart..............................31 Web 2.......................................................23 Wedgewood.............................................33 wet plate collodion...................................29

wilderness................................................27 William Eggleston....................................65 Wordsworth..............................................25 Yosemite..................................................29

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