Travel Pictures

Were I not desirous of keeping this essay free of footnotes, I might well have included an overture paying tribute to that grand opening of Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques: “Travel and travelers are two things I loathe.” After a glance or two in the direction of Sontag’s “On Photography” I might have acknowledged such academic studies as John Urry’s The Tourist Gaze or Dean MacCannell’s The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class before concluding my review of literature with a quotation from Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines characterizing nomads as people with “a motive for travel that went well beyond the vanity of documentation.” Simply thinking for a moment about the topic, it seems, provides ample evidence for the deep ambivalence that lurks behind travel. Such contradictions seem to underlie most of our important concerns and that, I suppose, is why we have art.


     Pictures have long been the most popular souvenir. Yet I myself have never photographed the places I have visited, though I am as fond as others of recalling past journeys. Perhaps I have wished to avoid looking like a tourist. After all, I learned as a child the classic satiric stereotype of the tourist with a camera hanging over his tropical shirt. Elders will recall the jokes about the ordeal of watching someone else’s vacation slides that were once common. Perhaps they may even have experienced such shows themselves.
     I also recall, though, community programs on the theme of travel. People would actually assemble in in a school auditorium or a library back room to watch either slides or a film, semi-professional at best, of Austria or Greece or Italy with a live narration by the traveler himself. As late as the nineteen fifties travel abroad was sufficiently infrequent that there was a market for this vicarious version though insufficient money was involved to elicit first-rate showmen.
     Now people are shoulder to shoulder in Angkor Wat and crowds gather in remote Icelandic fields hoping for an unseasonal Northern Lights and virtually all of those people are holding cell phone cameras. The traveler now returns with hundreds or thousands rather than a few dozen images. It is now a real question whether anyone ever looks at most travel photos a second or even a first time. Yet virtually everyone feels compelled to take them. Is it merely a more modern and less destructive form of bringing home trophy heads from a safari?
     The prevalent genres of the travel picture seem to me the least rewarding. Surely the most common type is the traveler posed with a slightly silly grin of satisfaction in front of a monument. It is as though the traveler were intent on preserving evidence for some panel of skeptical judges that the visit to Machu Picchu or the Taj Mahal had actually taken place. Virtually the only somewhat satisfactory version of this travel picture genre I have seen is a series by a couple who took their three year old child around the world, posing him in front of each historic castle or church, resulting in a display of enough wit and cute oddity to have at least a momentary interest for someone outside the family. But for most travelers, if a picture of an Olmec head is desired, why should the traveler enter the frame?
     There is some perverse egotism, never satisfied, lurking here. Not long ago the English queen, known for dignity and politesse, vented a complaint. Her loyal subjects, who all her life had pressed to approach her on public occasions, excited faces showing that they were experiencing the thrill of a lifetime, now invariably turn their backs to her in an effort to take cell phone pictures (the name selfie alone should be enough of a warning). She was quite right to call such behavior rude, but does it not also leave the picture-taker with an image less a portrait of Elizabeth Regina than of the photographer’s bad taste?
     A good number of tourists do omit the traveler and capture an image of the attraction itself, be it cathedral, fortress, statue, or grazing camels. Yet professional pictures of virtually all attractions and works of art are so easily available that I cannot conceive why people make so many new and generally inferior ones. In spite of the fact, picture-taking is more common than careful examination in many museums today. Queues actually form to snap the Mona Lisa, though, if the picture-taker later actually wished to study the painting, surely an online image would be preferable, or in a book, anything but the traveler’s own snapshot.
     I am carping, and, of course, everyone is entitled to select amusements to his or her own liking. Further, photography is a worthy art and being in an exotic environment makes taking pictures tempting indeed. In many streets of India a random shot in any direction would be of at least some interest to an American with curiosity.
     So far as I am concerned, pictures of people and street scenes are the traveler’s best bet. Far from privileging wonders of the world, I suspect everyone would agree that dodgy neighborhoods offer more rather than less opportunities for good scenes, though the rule is far from prescriptive. (After all, the crowd at Ascot might be as good as the shanties of Rio.) One can capture something unique, a record of a moment more likely to reflect the nature of the locale than its historic homes or grand fountains, and the possibilities are omnipresent. The traveler on the lookout for a scene worth the capture is encouraged to keep eyes and ears open, mind discerning, and is this not the point of visiting unfamiliar places? Surely one’s mind is broadening more when buying street food or watching a funeral pass by than when the tour bus pulls up to Mt. Rushmore or the bus driver points out the Monumento a la Revolución in Mexico City.
     Photographing people is also a safe bet, as almost all faces are complex and fascinating. Yet issues of respect and civility come into play. Having lived in the Haight-Ashbury at a time when busloads of visitors would sometimes step down and aim their cameras at me and my family, I know that it can seem an assault. Still, with or without permission, a face is virtually always worth a moment’s study.
     Among the travel pictures I have enjoyed, none are, strictly speaking, souvenirs with a primary appeal based on aiding the traveler’s recall of a pleasant vacation.
     I like several photos in our family albums of my wife’s grandparents traveling back and forth to Europe in the twenties and thirties. In one they are dressed in tuxedo and gown, in another in elaborate costumes for the ship’s masquerade ball, in a third, posing with pride next to a mountain of steamer trunks. They provide vivid detail of the sensibility of the time when few people crossed the Atlantic for pleasure, though I think the pictures would be as engaging for a viewer who had no connection at all with the subjects. These pictures have a solid journalistic appeal.
     On the cover of my chapbook Tourist Snapshots is a picture taken by Patricia of Moroccan street vendors. It provides an adequate suggestion, I hope, of the tone of the poems within. Yet, here too, I may get as well have chosen it from stock images. In fact, this picture was selected largely because it seemed so simultaneously exotic and typical. Even for me it carries no more associations than for another, though I was present when it was taken. My affection for North Africa is founded on intangible memory.
     One of my wife’s pictures we like well enough to hang on the dining room wall. Taken In Sarnath, the town on the outskirts of Varanasi where Buddha did his first teaching, it depicts the most modest of tea houses with two outdoor folding tables, a parked motor bike, and a solitary patron gazing into his cup. Above, a large and crudely painted sign identifies this establishment as the Thinkers’ Cafe. The primary appeal of the image is its contrast of the humble place with its ambitious name, a hot and dusty street where it is still possible for anyone with the price of a cup of tea to think thoughts as grand as a philosopher.
     Yet I realize that it does bring me back to thoughts not only of the message Buddha brought the bikkhus, but also to that museum in which we seemed the only ones examining the marvelous millennia old statues, while other visitors, Buddhist pilgrims, went from one to another touching them to collect mana like bees gathering pollen. I thought, too of the tree beneath which the Buddha was said to have preached, with its images of the five bhikkus, painted as brightly as carousel animals, from which we gathered a few leaves to bring home, unbelieving in magic but believing it possible that people could still their souls.
     So that photograph of the Thinkers' Cafe succeeds for me as a souvenir, as a physical object inspiring memory, in a way that a snapshot of my lovely wife standing in front of the stupa would not have done. A stock photo or a picture by a friend could also not have borne those associations. The picture is not art because its meaning is largely private and unavailable to others. The successful travel picture will combine an initial aesthetic appeal with a lingering subjective strain that diminishes sweetly until the picture is viewed once again, its meaning accessible to one alone, or, if that one is fortunate, perhaps for two.