Travel photography
Accepted by them, I was able to take photographs of these striking people [in Afghanistan] who, knowing nothing about photography, adopted no self-conscious poses; this is not easy to achieve in more sophisticated areas. When I first went to northern Kenya I took many photographs of relaxed and graceful tribesmen. Now, with the influx of tourists, all anxious to get photos, they have learnt to pose and demand money. Some, however, resent this intrusion and I have heard them protest: ‘We are not wild animals to be photographed’. I have increasingly refrained from taking photographs, except from a distance, in places where I am not known and accepted.(Wilfred Thesiger, Visions of a Nomad, 1987) These words, by one of the great travellers of modern times, underline the difference between travel and tourist photography. Since the 19th century, tourism has relied on an ever more complex and pervasive infrastructure embracing hotels, transport, amenities, and cuisine; and developed a perceptual framework incorporating the ‘Baedeker viewpoint’, brochures, postcards, and Kodak-sponsored ethnic dances. Most tourist photographs either conform to the resulting set of visual expectations or react against them in predictable ways.
Travel, both in the 19th century and since, has been a more individualistic and adventurous undertaking. The regions favoured by Thesiger (1910-2003) ‘had to present a serious challenge of hardship and danger, and had if possible to be unexplored’. His first journey as an adult, in 1933, was into the Danakil country of Ethiopia, where ‘three previous expeditions had been exterminated … by these tribesmen, who judged each other according to the number of men they had killed and castrated’. If not always quite so hazardous, difficult conditions were routine for the pioneering photographers of the 19th century, whose purposes were scientific, commercial, recreational, or a mixture of all three. Between the 1840s and 1914, scores of photographers on both sides of the Atlantic went to extreme lengths, in the early decades using heavy and cumbersome equipment, to capture images of exotic landscapes, people, and buildings. One of the most prolific was the English Quaker Francis Frith, who between 1856 and 1860 made three trips to Palestine andEgypt to photograph the monuments, and thereby, as Doug Nickel has argued, to fortify his contemporaries' belief in the reality of biblical events. Francis Bedford was hired to accompany the prince of Wales to the Holy Land in 1862. A select sample of other Europeans might include Sergei Levitsky in the Caucasus as early as 1843; the British clergymen George Bridges (fl. 1840s-1850s) and Calvert Richard Jones in the Mediterranean in the late 1840s; Maxime Du Camp in the Middle East in 1849-51; Samuel Bourne in the Himalayas in the 1860s; John Thomson in Cambodia and China in the 1860s and 1870s; and Georges Maroniez (fl. 1890-1910) in Egypt, the Maghrib, and elsewhere (also using autochrome) around the turn of the century. (Although closer to home, George Washington Wilson's photographic expeditions in the Scottish Highlands in the 1850s and 1860s were hardly less adventurous in terms of the privations and technical challenges they involved.)
From the end of the 19th century onwards, the availability of roll-film and increasingly portable cameras eased the travel photographer's problems. Indeed, one of the most interesting things about 20th-century travel photography is how much of it was done with rather basic equipment. The Australian marine photographer Alan Villiers (1903-82) in the 1920s and 1930s recorded his vast sailing-ship voyages with folding Kodaks costing a few shillings. Other adventurers, from Eric Newby (b. 1919) to Bruce Chatwin (1940-89), seem to have cared little for fancy equipment, preferring simplicity and lightness to sophistication. Thesiger began photographing in Ethiopia in 1930 with his father's decrepit Kodak. Not long afterwards he bought a Leica II, and relied on it until 1959, never using flash, a tripod, or colour film and usually working with a 50 mm standard lens. Thesiger in fact was not only a great traveller but a great travel photographer, in both activities despising the refinements of modern civilization. (Apart from the Acropolis, he never photographed any subject—or person—in Europe.) Though little interested in photographic technology he had a natural instinct for composition and lighting, demonstrated by the superb landscapes and portraits he made in Africa, Afghanistan, and Arabia. His selection of favourite images came to fill 65 albums.— Molly Rogers/Robin Lenman
Bibliography
- Fabian, R., and Adam, H.-C., Masters of Early Travel Photography (1983).
- Cortal, M., ‘Georges Maroniez, peintre et photographe’,
Bononia , 27 (1995).- Winding Paths: Photographs by Bruce Chatwin, introd. R. Calasso (1998).
- Osborne, P., Travelling Light: Photography, Travel and Visual Culture (2000).
- Nickel, D. R., Francis Frith in Egypt and Palestine: A Victorian Photographer Abroad (2004)
