Today¹, both travel and photography are global activities, engaged in as a seemingly natural combination by millions of people. The origins of photography and tourism are to be found in the second half of the 18th century, since which time these modern forms of experience have mutually conditioned and transformed each other. One of the crucial contributions to an understanding of their relationship is the concept of the tourist gaze, developed by sociologist John Urry (1990; Urry and Larsen 2011) and based primarily on Foucault’s (2000) and Crary’s (1990) notions of visual observation as a modern technique pertaining to the subject and power. The experience of the tourist, however much it has changed in history and has essentially a complex corporeal nature appealing to all the senses, is, according to Urry, most subordinated to the eye. The tourist’s visual experience is fundamentally formed by technical images and the tourism industry, which produces tourist destinations as attractions full of photographable moments. The tourist gaze in the sense of a discursive practice forms the experience of the tourist, determines what is worth visiting and looking at, what and how the tourist will look at, what they will experience, what and how they will photograph, and how they will remember their tourist expeditions.

In this short essay, I will also follow the tourist gaze, taking an interest in where it looks from and where (or at what) it is directed. I will be led by Urry (Crawshaw and Urry 2007; Urry and Larsen 2011) and his distinguishing of three forms of the tourist gaze: the Romantic gaze, whose beginnings are to be found in the individual collector of picturesque views and the tourist traveling in his imagination from the safety of his armchair; the collective, familial tourist gaze, which, following the arrival of Kodak in particular, saw families set out for tourist destinations around the world, camera in hand; and the gaze of the post-tourist, a result of a particular blend of the previous two perspectives. All three gazes have been mixing in various combinations since the late 18th century, sedimenting to form an unstable and porous discursive layer. I will attempt to uncover these discursive sediments of tourist photography by telling its story, returning, through three scenes, to the single shot of the Niagara Falls, made in April 1840 by Hugh Lee Pattinson.

Scene One

In the late 18th century, many inventors, scientists, artists, and travelers burned with a desire to photograph (Batchen 1997), which consisted in an attempt to capture images observed in the camera obscura or Claude glass and thus fix the fleeting visual perceptions they experienced on their journeys. The desire to photograph was born on journeys that took the character of individual expeditions in which visual experience was determined by a Romantic gaze framed by the aesthetic of the picturesque (Crawshaw and Urry 1997). It is here that a particular perspective of the world as a compendium of images was born; a walk through the landscape became another form of gallery visit, with the solitary “spectator” contemplatively gazing into their own soul when looking at the scenic landscape. 

At first, the invention of photography only transformed this form of experience to the extent that the hunters of the picturesque would set out on their expeditions armed with a photo camera rather than a Claude glass and a sketchpad. Although the market with illustrated topographical and travel books featuring depictions of landmarks and landscapes was extensive and had been so long before 1839, photography managed to accelerate it and allowed for these images of scenic tableaus to spread among far broader layers of the population. Although traveling as a leisure activity began developing in the mid-19th century, along with photography (Lash and Urry 1994: 261), the first tourists (a small group in today’s perspective) generally did not take photographs on their excursions – at most, they had themselves photographed. Throughout most of the 19th century, the practice of photography involved not only free time and disposable income, but also a considerable amount of dexterity, skill, and knowledge, so most of the public travelled virtually, sat in their armchairs, looking through images in travel books and illustrated magazines or photographs and their reproductions.

A significant example of this form of imaginary tourism is a collection, in book form, of graphic reproductions made after daguerreotypes, published between 1840 and 1844 by the Parisian optician and daguerreotypist Noël Lerebours (1840–1844) under the characteristic title Excursions Daguerriennes: vues et monuments les plus remarquables du globe (Daguerrean Excursions: The Most Remarkable Views and Monuments of the World). Lerebours catered to a public desirous of picturesque views and travel information whilst also admiring the precision and truthfulness of the new medium of photography in the form of reproductions rendered with absolute accuracy and accompanied by detailed descriptions. On the pages of Excursions, the magic of photography, which gives nature the possibility of accurately capturing itself, thus intersected with the Romantic desire to experience nature in its authentic form.

The long exposure needed to make daguerreotypes, however, did not allow the photographers to capture anything in motion, and daguerreotypes are generally devoid of people.² Lerebours (1840–1841) thus alerts his readers to the fact that during the creation of the engraving, these depictions were animated by the addition of people and animals. These figures are captured at moments when they are engaged in their everyday activities: ladies entering the Chartres Cathedral, riders on horseback traversing the courtyard of the Chateau de Fontainebleau, raftsmen sailing under the bridges on a view of Grenoble, dogs fighting in front of the Lyon town hall, children skipping rope and rolling hoops in the Tuileries Garden. However, they never pay any attention to the principal subject of the image – they do not admire the historical landmarks; they do not gaze at the picturesque landscapes of which they form an unwitting part.

Breaking tone with this style is one depiction, Niagara. Chute du fer a cheval (Niagara. Horseshoe Falls) (Ill. 1). The engraver, Frédéric Salathé, complemented this view engraved after Pattinson’s daguerreotype with a single solitary figure. With its back to the camera, it gazes at the waterfall. This is an entirely unique depiction of the observer and the direction of their gaze in Lerebours’ collection, corresponding most closely to the period notion of the Romantic traveller or pilgrim as we know it from the work of Caspar David Friedrich, a leading exponent of German Romanticism. In relation to the nascent phenomenon of mass tourism, however, there is, in fact, more at stake here. Joan Schwartz noted that the depictions in Excursions “fired the imagination of the armchair traveller and directed the itineraries of real travellers” (Schwartz 1996: 23). But depictions of the Niagara Falls inspired not only what the tourist should look at, but also what perspective they should take. As Geoffrey Batchen notes (2018: 184 – note 111), the viewer is invited to identify with the figure depicted; to stand in its place and give themselves over to this view of the Niagara Falls. We are thus faced with the first image of the traveler made after a daguerreotype; the future tourist, and this at the paramount moment of the traveling experience, facing the destination of the journey. His gaze is still solitary and Romantic.

Scene Two

During his visit to the Niagara Falls in April 1840, Hugh Lee Pattinson exposed at least eleven daguerreotype plates (Batchen 2018: 184 – note 111), of which only a single one was known for a long time, and even that only indirectly, in the form of the engraving discussed above. Some of Pattinson’s daguerreotypes, however, were found in the collections of the Newcastle University Library in 1997². Of these six daguerreotypes, five are of the Niagara Falls and one is of the Clifton House hotel, from whose terrace and close surroundings Pattinson took these images (Garret 1996).

Until these daguerreotypes were discovered, historians of photography were under the impression that the engraver, Frédéric Salathé, added the figure to Pattinson’s image in the same manner as they were added to other depictions. Among the discovered daguerreotypes, however, there is one which really does capture the figure of a man (Ill. 2). We are thus faced with probably the first intentional, staged capturing of a human figure en plain air. We know that in those cold and damp April days, Pattinson exposed his daguerreotypes for approximately twenty minutes, and so the figure standing on the edge of the cliff had to remain motionless for most of this time. We can only speculate as to the motifs for Pattinson’s unusual and complicated way of capturing the human figure, as he left us no information. Perhaps he wished to give the image a sense of scale to provide viewers with a better idea of the size of the Falls, or he could simply have been aiming to animate the image or affirm the aesthetic of the picturesque and the role of the solitary observer within it.

The question of who is captured in the image is also of great importance. Pattinson travelled to America primarily to explore potential investments in a silver mine, and we know that he was accompanied by a mining captain (Ireland and Pritchard 2023: 22), who could well have been the figure in the photograph. However, it could also have been someone entirely unknown to us, such as a Clifton House employee. It is also possible that it was Pattinson himself. This notion first appeared when the Newcastle University Library announced the discovery of Pattinson’s daguerreotypes (BBC 2010). Geoffrey Batchen (2016: 37), among others, wrote similarly of the figure on the image. If it really is Pattinson, he would have had to prepare the daguerreotype plate in the camera, open the shutter, and set off quickly to a spot some hundred meters away, towards the waterfall, then stood completely still, and return to the camera to close the shutter before the exposition time ran out.

Also remarkable is one detail distinguishable upon closer inspection (Ill. 3). It is clear that the figure is not looking at the Niagara Falls but at the camera: notice the posture, with the legs slightly bent at the knees, facing the camera; the head seems to be lifted in the same direction, as suggested by the edge of the top hat; there are white spots below the figure’s neck, possibly a shirt collar. Pattinson could have been looking at the camera to ensure that everything was in order. But the image can also be read as an expression of the Barthesian “That-has-been” (Barthes 2000), or, in the case of tourist photography, more an “I have been there”, confirmed by gazing into the camera. In this sense, Pattinson’s daguerreotype can be considered the first photographic depiction of a tourist in a form that gradually began appearing about a decade later and only became commonplace at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when the familiar innovations of the Kodak company led to tourists photographing themselves when they arrived at the destination of their journey. Pattinson’s shot is not, of course, a Kodak moment of the “say cheese” variety, but the performance he had to engage in for the camera does not pale in comparison to the performances effected today by tourists both in front of and behind the camera (Haldrup and Larsen 2003; Bærenholdt et al. 2007: 69–104). 

Regardless of who the figure on the image is and what their motivation was to turn their gaze away from the Niagara Falls and towards the camera, we are looking at a photograph of a gesture that distinguishes the Romantic gaze of the pilgrim from the gaze of the sightseer in the era of mass tourism, who is no longer interested in a view of the Falls themselves, but rather wishes to document the fact the they have been there. In Pattinson’s daguerreotype and the engraving made on its basis, two perspectives intersect: one aimed at nature, another at the camera. And it is this mixture of the gazes of the Romantic traveller and the mass tourist that is typical of the experience of the post-tourist, which can also be found in the story of Pattinson’s daguerreotype.

Scene Three

Throughout the 20th century, the tourist experience became more sensorially complex. Under the influence of the tourism industry, destinations transformed into bricolages of attractions that often had little to do with the character of the sites themselves. After all, even the Niagara Falls at the time when Pattinson was making his daguerreotypes were already a significant destination for vacationists and tourists. As LouAnn Wurst mentions (2011: 255–257), in the 1830s, fifteen thousand people visited the Niagara Falls each year, there were several hotels, and by the end of the 1840s, thanks to the development of the railway, they were visited by over fifty thousand tourists every year. The tourist facilities adapted to this, providing not only more hotels but also attractions of all kinds: museums of indigenous culture, souvenir shops, and restaurants, with the gradual addition of a wax figurine museum, a replica of Count Dracula’s castle, and the House of Frankenstein. In parallel to this process of making Niagara Falls more “attractive”, the universe of images and representations of the Falls grew rapidly. During the course of the 19th century, the flood of photographs was complemented by numerous paintings, panoramas, cycloramas, and stereographs of the Niagara Falls (McGreevy 1994; Lopes 2020), as well as images depicting tourists, captured both by local photographers and by the tourists themselves. The Niagara Falls began to be obscured by the layers of images, attractions, and tourists.

And it is within this confluence of attractions and images that the experience of the post-tourist began developing, typified, according to Urry (1990, Urry and Larsen 2011), by a resignation on any authentic experience. The post-tourist is, first and foremost, a consumer, but one who – openly and with a certain amount of reflection, levity, and irony – accepts the inauthentic, commercialized, and simulated experiences offered by the tourism industry. Urry emphasizes that for the post-tourist, a crucial role is played by the media technologies that influence the tourist experience before the journey, after it, and, most importantly, during the journey. Instead of visiting the real Falls, post-tourists instead prefer a visit to a nearby cinema, IMAX Niagara Falls, which offers them a larger-than-life experience.

In 2011, Pattinson’s daguerreotype returned to Niagara Falls (Ill. 4). The Newcastle University Library provided a reproduction on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of The Niagara Parks, which was installed as a plaque on the tourist promenade at approximately the same spot from which Pattinson took his famous photograph. Its primary aim was to commemorate Pattinson’s legacy and his importance in the history of the Niagara Falls. For the millions of visitors that walked past it, however, it could well have served merely as another attraction “preventing” them from seeing the Falls themselves. Perhaps some of them even took a picture with Pattinson’s photograph – how else than with their back to the Niagara Falls and their gaze fixed on the camera.

Image captions

1 | ›Niagara, Chute du Fer Cheval‹, 1842, etching and aquatint, with handcoloring, 
27 × 35 cm, Graphic artist: Friedrich Salathé. From daguerreotype by Hugh Lee Pattinson.
Published in Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours. Excursions daguerriennes: vues et monuments les plus remarquables du globe. Paris: N.P. Lerebours, 1842. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. No known restrictions on publication.

2 | Hugh Lee Pattinson. ›The Horseshoe Falls‹, 1840. The daguerreotype has inverted sides; it is direct positive. Courtesy: Special Collections, University of Newcastle.

3 | commemorative plaque initiated by Robin Anderson was installed at Niagara Falls in 2011. In 2013, the Niagara Parks Commission had it removed for reasons that remain unclear. Many thanks to Robin Anderson for providing this image. © Robin Anderson, 2011