Backwards Views

“Dined by two o'clock at the Queen’s Head, & then straggled out alone to the Parsonage, fell down on my back across a dirty lane with my glass open in one hand, but broke only my knuckles: stay’d nevertheless, & saw the sun set in all its glory.”² These words were written by Thomas Gray in a letter penned during his visit to the Lake District, then a newly discovered tourist destination in the north-east of England, in 1769. The glass he refers to is what’s known as a Claude glass, a simple device named after the painter Claude Lorraine and a standard component of a tourist’s backpack in the second half of the 18th century. It gave the sights reflected within it a particular picturesque quality.³ In addition to highlighting soft lights and shadows, it primarily ensured the separation of a selected segment of landscape from its disturbing surroundings.⁴ At the cost of the occasional accident, it managed to domesticate nature so that it corresponded to the aesthetic standards of the day: pleasant beauty mixing with a terrifying nobility. Additionally, the Claude glass can be considered – in line with Geoffrey Batchen – proof of the period “tourist’s” desire for photography that preceded the invention of photography itself.⁵

With the proliferating availability of photographic technologies at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, turning one’s back to the view became common practice. Tourists began facing away from various significant sites in order to face a camera typically held by another family member. The intimately familiar features and stances are captured on the background of cities abroad as if in an attempt to reconcile (particular) otherness and the (universal) whole.⁶ It is here, after all, that the essential if unattainable function of tourism lies, at least according to the American sociologist Deana MacCannell.⁷ In this respect, tourism, just like photography, represents a characteristically modern phenomenon.

According to a recent study covering the years 2008 to 2021 – that is, some 250 years after Gray’s fall – 379 people died while taking a selfie.⁸ As one can discover by reading the table in the corresponding Wikipedia entry, most of these people were tourists.⁹ If we consider the number of selfies taken during this period, the number is probably not that high. But on the other hand, if we consider the probable banality for which so many people lost their lives, it is difficult not to think that this, in fact, quite a high number. The fact that we so often turn our backs to the subject of our (tourist) interest (when taking photographs) is not a testament to the tourist’s shallowness, narrow-mindedness, or egocentricity, though these do spring to mind. On a more general and essential level, however, this fact suggests that both touristic and photographic practices, often hand in hand, organize certain patterns in our behavior and structure our experience. Such processes can seem at once banal and dramatic. Whether we are discussing the production or presentation of photographs (on walls, in albums, on the web…), images become the background on which we play back our lives – and, in some cases, our deaths too.¹⁰ This begs the question of whether these fatal selfies can be considered symptoms of the self-destructive nature of the present. More apt, perhaps, is the observation of Japanese philosopher Hiroki Azuma on the dark tourism phenomenon as an intermediary between ordinariness and extraordinariness, which it allows us to come to know as something accidental.¹¹ 

Flaying the World

In 1859, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote of photographic technology that it was flaying the world and leaving behind only worthless carcasses.¹² Though this might sound unlikely today, he meant that as a compliment. According to Holmes, photography achieved a particular liberation of all things and places whose forms were then to become generally available. Holmes’s claims were repeated in numerous variants but usually arriving at the opposite judgement. Such explications rely on the general assumption that photography brings about a disruption of the original site, or even its irretrievable loss. A more convincing conception was proposed by Jonas Larsen and John Urry, leading sociologists of tourism, according to whom photography must be understood not as more or less distorted images of the real world but as a technology for world-making.¹³ Which, of course, does not necessarily mean that the world that is thus created is one in which we would like to live.

The historical ties between travel, photography, and flaying are, after all, closer than Holmes’s figurative explication might make it seem. The significant Czech explorer Emil Holub took no photographs on his expeditions to south Africa.¹⁴ While in the case of his first expedition (1872–1879), the absence of a camera can be explained by the DIY nature of the expedition, but for the second trip (1883–1887), Holub refused the offer of several interested photographers, for reasons that remain unclear to this day. Instead, he relied on his own notes, drawings, and, most importantly, collected natural and cultural objects. Instead of the “light scalps” that Holmes wrote about, Holub brought back the real skins of wild animals. These were then used to make animal figurines that populated dioramas shown at exhibitions in Vienna (1891) and Prague (1892). Some of these figurines were strangely deformed in comparison to their living models – in most cases, the European taxidermists who prepared them did not know their original form. What Holub did not underestimate was the photographic documentation of the exhibition in Prague. He hired the well-known Prague-based photographer Jan Malač, who immortalized the model of the “native” village. Holub, it seems, was satisfied with his work. He forwarded blow-ups of these photographs to both his acquaintances and significant figures from public life, and also accompanied his articles with reproductions of these images.

These were probably not yet tourist photographs in the established sense of the word, and not only because they were not taken at a distant location. Given the destinations he chose, Holub can hardly be considered a representative of the mass tourism of the period. Furthermore, his expeditions always had two goals, which were only later divided: academic knowledge and pleasure in adventure.¹⁵ Last but not least, Holub made his journeys in an entirely different economy of photography: at the time, travel photographs were meant to satisfy a desire for distance; the later tourist photographs generally attempt to elicit such desire.¹⁶

Even so, it seems that Malač’s photographs suggest something essential about tourist photography. In hindsight, they seem like the archetype of tourist photography, with the unwitting doubling of representation capturing the staged nature of the entire scene. More than the original intention of mediating something alien, we perceive the alienating effect of the means chosen. It is therefore easy, today, to mock the taxidermic, dioramatic, and photographic staging of the time. And it is equally facile to laugh at tourists, as the Western German critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote as early as 1958.¹⁷ The same is also true of tourist photography. Such mockery, however, offers little more than twisted doubling of the forced smiles that tourists aim at their cameras. Of course it does not follow from this that it is unnecessary to discuss violence in cultural and natural terms that are connected both to the travelers of days gone by and to tourism (and due to which faraway places are transformed to conform to the imagination of the photographing tourist). But, as Enzensberger noted, we should probably avoid underestimating the force that drives the throngs of intruders to the beach.

Tourists Against Tourism

Most tourists probably do not exhaust themselves with explicitly identifying such a contradiction, but it nevertheless seems that they sense it implicitly. At least as much is suggested by the fact, pointed out by MacCannell, that no one wants to be a tourist.¹⁸ According to Jonathan Culler, contempt for tourism serves mostly as protection against the admission that we ourselves could be considered tourists.¹⁹ Contempt has accompanied tourism since its beginnings, when it was usually marked by a feeling of class superiority.²⁰ When the formerly aristocratic privilege of “purposeless” travel became democratized with the onset of democratic society, a hatred for tourism also spread fast. Numerous popular and theoretically rigorous interpretations point out the self-denying nature of tourism. They focus, in various ways, on the problem of authenticity, or rather its absence, which is strikingly demonstrated in the act of taking photographs. It is in this context that Susan Sontag wrote in her 1977 book On Photography: “A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it – by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.”²¹ Tourists aim to achieve authenticity, but this authenticity retreats further with each press of the shutter button. Paraphrasing Culler’s observation stated above, we could say that taking photographs or shooting videos is not only the mark of the tourist but also an attempt to cover the fact that we ourselves are tourists.

Alienation Without Labour

The unwillingness to recognize oneself as a tourist has two advantages. First, we need not consider ourselves part of the problem. And second, we need not concede that we are, in certain situations, potentially “other” ourselves. Another dimension of the problem was pointed out by Sontag, who claimed that tourist photography is particularly attractive “to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic”, among which nations she included Germans, Japanese, and Americans.²² The implicit moral condemnation of tourist photography is perhaps a similar stereotype to the national characteristics that Sontag called upon – which does not mean that stereotypes don’t work, in a sense: “Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.”²³ This thesis fits striking well within the framework of MacCannell’s “ethnography of modernity”, which, characteristically, is based not on the figure of the laborer, as is the sociology of industrial modernity, but on the figure of the tourist. While it was once labour that allowed one to know one’s way around the world and find one’s placed within it, later, this task was increasingly relocated to the domain of free time.²⁴ Tourism is then conceived as an opposite of work, from which it offers respite. The tourist is alienated, but they search for fulfillment in their alienation.²⁵ 

What to take from all this? As usual with tourism, we can choose from at least two paths. One says that there is nothing to do but come to terms with the vacuous form of the established understanding of freedom, which is based primarily on the opportunity to travel. The other posits a story in which tourist photographs offer views into a world in which no one works because they have to.

Image captions

1-4 | Photographs from the Prague exhibition of Dr. Emil Holub in 1892, Photo: African Museum of Dr. Emil Holub in Holice