tourism and photography

Tourism pre-dates photography; but it is striking that the rise of Thomas Cook, the ‘father of modern tourism’ who led his first ‘Tartan Tour’ to Scotland in 1846, should have coincided with the first decade of the new medium. Today, the two practices are closely intertwined, each shaping and stimulating the other, with photography serving tourism as advertisement, commodity, instruction, and memento; and tourism serving photography as subvention, vehicle, justification, and structuring activity. Each of these complex undertakings influences each of the others, and the meaning and intention of each shifts constantly.

Photographs promote tourism when they appear in newspaper and magazine advertisements, in brochures, on billboards, railway stations, websites, and in television commercials. They often serve the same purpose in feature stories, informational travelogues, calendars, coffee-table books, museum exhibitions, and the like. They are usually idealized, and reduced to a few widely recognized signifiers, such as a palm-fringed beach, Big Ben, the Taj Mahal, a gondola, or a sombrero. In the past, mass-produced images of places were widely disseminated as collectable albumen-print views available in various formats either at or far from the places they depicted, and as postcards, stereographs, and (in the 19th century mostly in engraved form) as illustrations in books and periodicals. Often, as in the cases of Niagara Falls, Yellowstone, the Scottish Highlands, the English Lake District, and the Alps, these images drew on pre-photographic visual conventions to identify, define, and legitimize new tourist destinations. In the USA as early as 1872 the New York firm of E. & H. T. Anthony offered prints of the American West made for government surveys by William Henry Jackson, Carleton Watkins, and others. When sightseeing in wheeled vehicles became possible at Yosemite in 1874, views of the principal features were already on sale, and the region's leading hotelier popularized them on the American lecture circuit. In Scotland from the 1860s both George Washington Wilson and James Valentine began purveying views of tourist sites to the British middle and upper classes, then expanded their operations overseas; Valentine eventually became one of the world's largest manufacturers of postcards, with an important sideline in tourist guidebooks. In Italy, the Alinari brothers in Florence and Naya in Venice distinguished themselves among the country's countless 19th-century view specialists.

Tourists buy photographs before, during, and after their travels. Differing in use from advertisements and brochures, these images are commodities in their own right, functioning as means of instruction, gifts, or complex mementoes and validations. As early as the 1850s tourists could buy individual prints or albums depicting popular sites from hotels, stationers, booksellers, and street vendors. Today, postcards, posters, souvenir publications (including videos and DVDs), and photo-decorated T-shirts, plates, and ashtrays are on sale wherever tourists gather. Some images offer tips on local codes of behaviour, or incorporate brief information on the sites or monuments they depict. In general, images marketed to tourists are limited to a repertoire of instantly recognizable iconic subjects. A sub-trope of this category of tourist photographs is that in which tourist and icon are combined, ranging in its commercial form from early 20th-century images of camel-borne tourists in front of the Pyramids to modern Polaroids of visitors in Red Square against the backdrop of Lenin's tomb.

Amateurs travelled with cameras long before photography was easy or accepted, but the advent of roll-film made it much simpler, cheaper (by middle-class standards), and more commonplace. It also came just in time for the bicycle boom of the 1890s, and by c.1900 bicycle (and, more gradually, automobile) tours were featuring in many a snapshot album. Hotels responded to the surge of self-propelled amateurs by offering darkroom facilities. Early tourist snapshots often resembled the professional ‘view scraps’ long available for sale, but the shift from buying photographs to making them gradually made photography a major component of the tourist day, both as a pastime and a means to infiltrate, occupy, understand, and control alien space. Flirting and larking about also became a recordable aspect of the holiday or honeymoon experience. In the early 21st century, against the background of mass tourism's vast expansion since 1945, photographers are often given signposts to the best vantage point for a successful picture; ‘Hula shows’ and similar performances are structured for photography (and may even be sponsored by camera manufacturers); film cartons litter popular sites; and organizers of ‘camera safaris’ and photographic workshops in scenic locations advertise photograph taking as the rationale for the trip.

When tourists return home, their photographs become complex mementoes, evidence of a journey that condenses a multifaceted experience into sets of discrete rectangles to be sorted, shared, and organized into an idealized narrative. As in the 19th century, some narratives may take the form of carefully edited and captioned holiday albums. Many more pictures will remain structureless and loose in shoeboxes or envelopes or, unprinted, on CD-Rs, doomed to be forgotten or discarded. The social or sharing aspect of tourist photography remains significant, with the slide show or office hand-round giving way to the digital video display or the Internet website or weblog. But considerations of status, and of various kinds of social transaction, still apply. And, like the unwritten rules of tourist picture taking, those of the ‘return’ phase have tended to remain remarkably stable. Airport delays, medical emergencies, or arguments with teenage children, if recorded at all, are unlikely to be shared with colleagues and friends. The conventions of tourist seeing are thus deeply established in society, replicated, and passed on as expectations to future vacationers.

— Alison Nordström

Bibliography

• Löfgren, O., ‘Wish You Were Here! Holiday Images and Picture Postcards’, Ethnologia Scandinavica, 15 (1985).
• Geary, C. M., and Webb, V.-L. (eds.), Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards (1998).
• Osborne, P. D., Travelling Light: Photography, Travel and Visual Culture (2000).
• Crouch, D., and Lübbren, N. (eds.), Visual Culture and Tourism (2003)