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Tourist Photographs as Souvenirs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Joe Bensen  and
Robert Silberman
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Extract

No matter what karl malden says in the American Express ads, it is a camera, not a charge card, that most tourists don't want to leave home without. The camera has become the definitive symbol of tourism (Figure 1). To be a tourist without taking pictures is somehow a violation of the rules; as Paul Fussell has noted, the only people who don't bring cameras on trips are those who are playing at being “antitourists,” ostentatiously flaunting their supposed freedom from being “mere” tourists.

Type
Souvenirs
Information
Prospects , Volume 11 , October 1986 , pp. 261 - 271
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

NOTES

1. Tourist photography is mentioned, but not really analyzed, in the basic studies of tourism as a cultural phenomenon: Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977)Google Scholar, a collection of essays edited by Valene Smith; and The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class by MacCannell, Dean (New York: Schocken Books, 1976)Google Scholar. The standard studies of tourist photography are two articles by Chalfen, Richard, “Photography's Role in Tourism: Some Unexplored Relationships” (Annals of Tourism Research, 6, 1979, pp. 435–447)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and an expanded and revised version, “Tourist Photography” (Afterimage, 11 (1 & 2), Summer 1980, 26–29)Google Scholar. We arem grateful to Professor Chalfen for his comments on an earlier version of.this paper, and to all those who gave us access to their personal tourist photos and other materials.

2. Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 47.Google Scholar

3. See The Grand Tour by Hibbert, Christopher (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1969)Google Scholar. According to Hibbert, , “The Tourist himself, if he had any talent at all, was expected to make drawings of the places he visited and the buildings he saw” (p. 244)Google Scholar. On the artistry of the tourists, see also pp. 142, 235, 245, and, for examples of how images and objects incorporating scenic views provided souvenirs for tourists, see pp. 135, 220–221, and 233–234.

4. For Sommer, see Giorgio Sommer: fotografo a Napoli by Palazzoli, Daniela (Milan: Electa Editrice, 1981)Google Scholar; for Babbitt, Photography and the American Scene by Taft, Robert (New York: 1938; rpt. New York: Dover, 1964), p. 96Google Scholar, and The Daguerreotype in America by Newhall, Beaumont, 3rd ed. (New York: Dover, 1975), pp. 68–59 and 139Google Scholar; for Bennett, , Pioneer Photographer: Wisconsin's H. H. Bennett by Sara Rath (Madison: Tamarack Press, 1979).Google Scholar

5. “Tourist Photography,” p. 26Google Scholar. Because of our emphasis on photographs as souvenirs we have for the most part avoided Chalfen's third category, “pictures produced about tourists and places to visit.” There is, however, a clear relation between the photographs used in travel literature and advertisements “about tourists and places to visit” and the kinds of photographs tourists take.

6. “An Expert's Advice to the Tourist Photographer,” in Travel Photography, The Life Library of Photography (New York: Time-Life Books, 1972), p. 12.Google Scholar

7. The National Lampoon movie “Vacation” (Director, Harold Ramis, 1983)Google Scholar, starring Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo, uses “souvenir” photographs of the family on their trip as the backdrop for the closing credits. This provides a playful and affectionate final note after the comic mayhem of the movie. We never see photographs being taken in the movie proper, although the family members are shown wearing cameras. The photos at the end are somewhere between studio publicity stills and photos that could actually have been taken by, or of, the characters. As Karal Ann Marling pointed out, these group portraits at the end are personal, in contrast to the postcards of roadside attractions and tourist views that were used behind the opening credits. In her words, the final photos show “people not stuff.”

8. The Image; Or, What Happened to the American Dream (New York, Atheneum, 1962), Chapter 3 (pp. 77–117)Google Scholar, “From Traveler to Tourist: The Lost Art of Travel.” See also, Sontag, Susan, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), esp. pp. 9, 23, 57, 64, 81Google Scholar. Fussell notes the snobbishness of killjoys who look down their noses on mass tourism, priding themselves on their own aristocratic independence (Abroad, p. 40)Google Scholar. But Fussell himself clearly mourns the age, before the development of tourism, when “travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment” (Abroad, p. 39).Google Scholar

9. On the “image-ethics” of the relationship between natives and tourists, see Chalfen's sections on “Native Sensitivies and Host Community Reactions” and “Image Accomodation” in “Photography's Role in Tourism,” pp. 441–443Google Scholar, and the revised version in “Tourist Photography,” pp. 27–28.Google Scholar