Kodak Moments and Nokia digits…
The photograph, the journey and the travelogue, the traditional triumvirate of the holiday experience… With so many of us returning from vacation it is worth re-evaluating the memory and how we capture it.
The Greeks first listed the Seven Wonders of the World – icons which celebrated religion, power, art and science and served to demarcate the Mediterranean landscape from the uncivilised world beyond. Now, the Seven Wonders include the Taj Mahal and The Pyramids. A recent addition to one version of the list is the Eurotunnel, a wonder which, quite literally, is phenomenological – because the tunnel cannot be seen, as such, the experience is the travelling through – it is always becoming. Indeed the way the Euro-Tunnel is invisible, and only ‘appears’ for us once it fails, acts as a metaphor for contemporary travel.
For tourist travel to be successful, the speed and comfort of the trip - the necessity that it is uneventful – is paramount. The journey itself ‘disappears’: in travel-brochure tourism, in favour of the attractions at the other end; in luxury travel, in favour of the attractions on board – internet access, full waitress-service and the rest. Even, the loss of the sense of travelling is itself lost to us, because we are otherwise disposed. With bargain-bucket air travel one might say that the idea that a journey is worth anything has disappeared…yet at least it is on these particular journeys, that one finally becomes nostalgic for the idea that ‘the passage’ used to be, in someway, special. Today, travel is made up from units of consumption – from the duty free shop for the tourist to the way even off-the-beaten-track travellers say they have ‘done’ a country as if they are ticking it off a shopping list…
This collapse of A to B, is a modern phenomena. In part it is explained by the ‘constant now’ of today’s living and the speed of distance travelled. In part by the way identity, ritual and artefact have all become mobile, often spliced with which ever economic environ it finds itself in. Arguably, it is now impossible to experience ‘anew’ the places we visit – the anthropologist, James Clifford, in The Predicament of Culture writes ‘An older topography and experience of travel is exploded. One no longer leaves home confident of finding something radically new, another time or space’. Previously he had pointed out the ‘”exotic” is uncannily close’. So, the European eye which once unpicked the fabric of foreign lands; India, Africa, The Middle East, can now experience the ‘authentic’ at home: local market stalls, grocery aisles and the Discovery Channel all provide the exotic.
Further more, the aesthetic of travelling is now pre-experienced thanks to the legacy of cinema, advertising and early 20th century photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson. Bresson’s black and white photographs provided an outline of form – the templates of place; making icons of Mexico, New York, London and Paris etc. – all delineated into simple lines and shapes – with later photographers, advertising and film adding local colour to form a final composite which is eventually transferred to anything we look at when on our travels.
Although travelling is always about looking – providing a constant train window of change – with the professional photograph as with the snap-shot, the temporal nature of change that is the crux of travel is frozen. It is replaced by a series of representations of ‘I am here’: clock towers, feats of engineering, historic relics all become stereotypical representations which confirm and sustain our understanding of any given place. Photography - from social index (‘travel broadens the mind’) to confirmation of ritual (‘can we have the bride and groom here please?’) to captioning experience (‘it’s a Kodak moment’) - lost its claims to objectivity long ago.
If we accept this pre-packaged summation of the photograph, both politically and aesthetically, what now?
Increasingly we see people with a camera-phone that, on taking a picture, gives the option [send?] before [save?] and conflates the digital realm of email (data flow) with the more temporal (and analogue) photo album. And so a man under 5ft tall, being pulled along by a crowd, holds his camera-phone high above the others’ heads trying to capture for himself what he is theoretically passing by. So the phone goes one better than a slightly taller friend, for it can report the ‘natural’ perspective of the scene to be assimilated into the individual’s experience.
The mobile phone has become an extension of ourselves – a sixth digit between thumb and index finger, and is the closest we have come to Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy of technology becoming a natural extension to the body. The camera has always been hailed as a mechanical eye, yet one would hand it to a passer-by to take a picture of oneself in front of the Taj Mahal. With a camera phone, you are less likely to pass it over to anyone else, but then nor would you use such a low-pixel camera to take that iconic shot. It is this intimate relationship we have with the mobile phone which, when coupled with a camera, requires a very different understanding of the personal photograph. For us it is as intimate, transient and lacking in fidelity as memory.
The fact that the mobile phone photograph is completely different from a traditional photograph is important because this epistemological split is mirrored in how travel is often perceived, as if we were moving from photograph to photograph…
Monika + Colin
The thing you miss is that alongside the send/save button you have the option to delete – think how much the found object/photograph has been a basis of so much art and at the moment the craze for the found photograph! How many student portfolios are full of found bits and pieces – ad infinitum. It will be the delete button which will have a profound affect visual culture.
/Barry 05/09/2005