Amateur photographers - Jill Tweedie's view

this article is critical of amateur photography. I'd be interested to hear the reactions to it of anyone who travels with a camera:

In a few short weeks the camera season begins. Loaded down with film and filters and huge black boxes, the first of hordes of tourists will start to flood across the world, an infestation of locusts that give out a myriad of dry clickings as they land. Smile, click. Say cheese, click. A bit to the left, click. Keep still, click.
All travel is now merely a means of moving a camera from place to place, all travellers are ruled by the all-powerful lens. Visitors old-fashioned enough to wish only to stand and look with their anachronistic eyes are shoved aside by the photographers, who take it for granted that while they do their ritual focusing, nothing else may move or cross their vision. Those peculiar souls without a camera must step aside for those more properly occupied, must wait while the rituals take place, and must bide their time while whole coaches stop and unleash upon the landscape the Instamatic God. And the populations of whole countries seeing themselves cannibalised, swallowed up, vacuumed into the black-ringed staring eye, wrench what they can from the cannibals. You want take picture me? You pay. You want picture my house, my camel? You pay.
None of this would matter, perhaps, if anything worthwhile was being accomplished. If all the constant busyness and clicking produced, at its end, what had not existed before, images of beauty captured or truth told, then who could complain? But, sadly, this isn't so. The camera is simply graffiti made respectable. Nice people do not cut their initials on walls any more. Nice people aim their lenses, develop their film, and prove in that way the same age-old human message - Kilroy Was Here.
The camera is the means by which we stamp ourselves on everything we see, under cover of recording the Wonders of the World already wonderfully recorded by professionals and on sale at every corner bookshop and newsagent. But what use to us an illustrated book of perfect photographs? What use to show Aunt Maud, back home, postcards of the Taj Mahal, the Coliseum, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, a Tuscan landscape, since we are not in the picture to prove that we were there?
No stretch of rocks has verity unless I am within it. No monument exists but for my wife, leaning against it. No building is real if it does not contain my husband at its door. No temple is of interest without my face beside it, grinning. With my camera I appropriate everything beautiful, possess it, shrink it, domesticate it, and reproduce it on my blank sitting-room wall to prove to a selected audience of friends and family the one absolutely vital fact about these beauties: I saw them, I was there, I photographed them, and, ergo, they are.
Even this immense ego-mania might be forgivable if some truth, some meaning emerged, albeit in the background, behind the smirking faces. But most amateur photographers show no interest in the world as it is, only in the world as it ideally should be. For tourists, it is a world of images as clichéd as brochures, calculated to arouse envy in the bosoms of the stay-at-homes.
Thus, all photographs of famous tourist sights must, for a start, eliminate their one overwhelming ingredient - other tourists, Patiently, the photographer waits while the crowds surge round about and pounces, clicks, in the one infinitesimal second when his target is clear of all others but Gladys. So Aunt Maud, at home, sees a peaceful idyll, an uncharted ruin far from the haunts of any human but Gladys. And lies are often more deliberate than that. You wish to show that you have been to places ancient, untouched, quite outside the stream of ordinary tourism, quite outside the stream of modern life. You want a picture of the Real India - a scene as old as time. Unfortunately for you, a glassy modern building edges up to the mosque; behind the minaret television aerials spike the sky; beside the elephant two Indians in unsuitable Western suits stand discussing business; and all around the cars hoot and squeal.
So you must stand and twist your camera, hold it up sideways, shift your position so that the little yellow lines just clear the building, just cut out the aerials and the telegraph wires, just exclude the business men and their cars while retaining the rest. And when all these alien elements have, for a precious moment, been obliterated, click. There, Aunt Maud. The Real India. The India nobody who has actually been there will ever actually see. That is the summit of the amateur photographer's art - total unreality. The World As It Isn't, and our Fred.
Travel with camera wonderfully narrows the mind.

From: "Amateur Photography: the world as it isn't and our Fred" by Jill Tweedie

many times I want to make some special or extra nice pictures..
I m too shy or too much concerned about "hurting" people with my lense,beeing to offensive or too aggressive maybe..
so I don t click...
but sometimes I give my camery too small local kids or children "tell them" what I d like to photograph and they do the job for me..
no problem at all...just sometimes the quality isn t that perfect,,
but once in a dozen or so I got some really nice pics..
and it s great fun for me and the children as well...
but I wouldn t recommend it if you got a very expensive camera..
but I guess if you just use your big camera in your head you will
take pics from the life how it is..
is it really possible to take pics from feelings??
remember taking pics from the sea the first time you ve been there?

Mixed reaction. A lot of it is true: people often don't see because they're photographing. Oh, there goes the Pope, there goes the parade, there's the sunset. I'll photograph instead of looking.
And photographers can be bothersome; they're blocking your view or you feel you're blocking theirs. And Fred is indeed next to the Notre Dame doorway.
But to say that the photographs aren't worthwhile, or are available elsewhere, that's silly. Most professional tourist site photography is devoid of soul, and even more lacking in aerials and telephone wires and tourists than the "snapshots" tourists take. When you yourself photograph a site, you pick what you want to photograph, and it can be memorable. I keep looking at the pictures I took several years ago. And they mean more to me than what I see in travel magazines.
The article is elitist and unkind. It belongs to a genre of easy literature that gets printed. People are supposed to love all this bitching, which passes for satire just like (the writer accuses) the pictures pass for the real India. Sorry to say, but I wish most writers would go away; I'll take the photographers any day.
So there.

Instamatic? When was this written, in the '30's?

I am less concerned with the reactions of Aunt Maud ( no disrespect , I`m sure she is ever so nice ) than how different approaches to taking pictures affects the relations between me and the people I meet.
I came back from my last trip with two vivid images of how fed up Ladakhis have become with intrusive photography. The first one is when an old lady leaps up from the carpet, snatches a camera and a khaki hat and starts a sketch called ladakhi tourist : you two - closer, no not like that, I dont want you in the frame...
The other is during a religous dance : after indicating twice with the sword to the the guy with the videocam that he was in the way the monk decided not be hindered anymore and went over and through the obstacle. Ten years ago this way of tackling a conflict would have been unthinkable ; this time the ladakhis just seemed weary.
In spite of being a pixel junkie I find myself putting the camera away more and more . The catch phrase here for me is taking pictures ; if I know the people involved , have some kind of relationship to them, then I am not taking something without asking.
It is easy to get stuck on the theme of intrusion , disrespect etc but photography also has constructive side : showing interest implies respect and this can boost the self-image ( I think this have been important for the beleugered Tibetan culture, for instance).
I really liked paan wallahs idea of engaging the kids ; wish I had thought of that.
Another thing I have experiences from is sharing ; bringing a small box with pictures from home .

I second (third?) the local kids thing. I have a digital camera, and once or twice I have asked a group of kids if they mind having their picture taken. A few will jump at the opportunity. Then right away you show them the picture you've taken and they love it. Then others want their pictures taken. Their reaction is always one of delight, they won't ask for money because they get to see the picture, and it definitely beats the "one pen" syndrome, that can ruin your ability to enjoy talking to kids.
If you fear taking too many pictures, just delete a bunch of them later at the hotel. You don't really need all those pictures, but you still enjoyed the little game and the kids did too.
Kids love technology, and exchanging e-mail addresses is another favorite thing for them.

One reason I posted this article (it was originally a discussion text I used with my English students - sorry, abracax, don't know exactly when it was written, though I'd hazard a guess at the 1980s sometime) was to concentrate on my own thoughts about taking a camera on this upcoming trip.

Yes, vistet, I've witnessed the "sketch" you speak of, although while doing the tribal trek route in Thailand. A fellow trekker, his person literally dribbling with camera bodies and tripods, went up to the open bamboo house of a Lahu tribal, thrust a ten foot-long telephoto lens through the window, and began snapping unbidden, enraging the otherwise polite village folk.

What I've always seen in this camera lark is the way subjects are chosen to reinforce our mental pictures of the countries we're in. We might fight strenuously against the cliché pictures in tourist brochures, but they surface in our subconscious when we point the lens, framing what we stand in the middle of in the way Jill Tweedie speaks of. A mosque without telephone poles in the background. The mysterious East, with a vast jungle the straddles the Equator, deserted beaches, mountains that tower over the viewer into the deep blue sky... Not forgetting the people, generous and simple, living a life unchanged over generations. It is my view that inside us we each want to believe in such a world, even while dismissing it as fanciful, romantic twaddle. We want to believe in it even more now, because it's clear that the jungle is shrinking away to nothing, and the "simple people" all have - or aspire to - Star TV. It's not easy to incorporate that into the mental notion of travel in far-off places, unless you want to specialise in themes of juxtaposition - something which can itself become cliché. With digital manipulation from software, the "doublethink" world has become even more polarised.

I travellled one time in Indonesia without a camera. I must say that I don't miss not having the aids to memory that pictures from that trip might have been. My memory with pictorial assistance would probably be just as distorted as without.

Yeah, paan wallah... you are lucky to be able to turn taking pictures into a game. I wish you well with it, but I know I could never do it in your easy way. For me, taking pictures becomes one of two things: either a duty in the final third of any trip - "Get the damn camera out and start taking pictures, or you'll be taking dozens of unexposed rolls back with you!" Or else it becomes an exercise in technical appreciation of which exposure and viewpoint would best represent the subject. Neither is an engagement with what I'm looking at, I feel. When I cast my eyes over my living room cabinet seething with yellow Kodak slide boxes, and over the twin dissolve-frame projectors that feed on them, it really does seem to come down to multiple intonations of, "I was there." Perhaps I should just burn the lot and buy postcards.

Yes, this is an interesting issue, and a difficult one for me as well, this photography thing. But isn't it just a metaphor for travel?

1. We distort by just being there, by our mere presence with a Western backpack among people who look different, by changing the menu in a restaurant to include CTM, by bringing opium to the young people in a village just because we trek, by having Laotian young women leave their poor families and settle in Pattaya to make some quick money, and
2. we see what we want to see most of the time, camera or not.

I think I photograph what I think I see (I'm too wise to think I know what I'm doing ); I consciously avoid letting the camera dictate the way I travel, yet I know it does somewhat.

The deciding factor for me is that the seeing the slides, prints, or digital images is a pleasure onto itself that goes beyond merely remembering the trip. And that includes the pleasure of sharing with my friends and family back home. And where I photographed as well: I just sent a CD of my pictures to Thailand to a local teacher I became frends with while I was there. Photography can sometimes integrate you with the culture, not always make you an intruder.

And travel in general is too much of a pleasure for me to abandon it; I guess most travelers are selfish. But just like those awful zoos make children aware that animals are to be loved and preserved, and theme park-like rainforest adventures in Costa Rica make people pollute less, our clumsy contact with remote cultures may be a necessary evil to make us less xenophobic, more respectful of others' right to exist and be as they are.

I suspect that most of the people in this forum are at the respectful end of the traveling crowd. Thanks for making me think by posting this topic, MT, and keep your students aware!

just remembering a funny story I had some years ago..
me and a friend were standing in madurai in the sri meenakshi temple as some japanese tourists approached us,around 60,
they saw us,many of them were shouting, staring at us
"hippies hippies"!,and then all the crowd started to take pictures from us..in this moment I really felt like beeing an Et or an animal in a zoo..
but the revenge was "bitter" for them..
in exchange we took our cameras,I guess they thought :do hippies have cameras?,ran up to them shouting ,Oh japanese tourist and took a lot of pics from them...
the strange scene ended up in a big laughter...
I guess for the indian vistors that time it was quite funny as well.

A RELATED TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHY ARTICLE:
http://www.pilotguides.com/community...hotography.php

Haven't you thought that in this "news 4 minutes old" world of the internet, someone, somewhere is able to photograph a news item? Think about the Tsunami, the world was desperate for amateur photographs or video footage of NAYTHING related to the Tsunami.

I recall fantastic amateur photographs of Aceh, during and immediatly after the Tsunami waves struck.

I urge ever amateur to take MORE photographs, blog them, use your cell phone camera and moblog them to the internet !

Paul

That article is really a straw man argument. It assumes people and attitudes that don't actually exist, then pats itself on the back for toppling them.

For one thing, it assumes that all tourists are western and the locations eastern or ancient. Is she so critical of the Japanese taking pictures in Times Square?

Photography is easily one of humanity's favorite activities, and its results are some our most cherished artifacts.

She hearkens back the old "stealing souls" canard that someone made up about natives and photography. It's all just BS.

I travel for the point of taking photographs, and I learn more, meet more people, take risks, and have more fun than I ever would without a camera.

I get very upset with photographers who have no respect. My particular 'favourite' was a gentleman from a particular country who, in Pushkar, whilst wearing a leather jacket snapped pictures of the bathers on the ghats. Now this offended me in extreme, and I consider myself to be a photographer - I hope my Indiamike gallery goes some way to support this. I feel that my pictures are of a reasonable standard, and I desparately hope that others enjoy them.
I have missed hundreds of great pictures over the years because I can't quite snap first and ask questions later, but that is just the way I am.
The thing is if people didn't take pictures we would, as a world, have missed everything.
But, we must have respect, people don't have to be photographed if they don't want to. If you are taking pictures from a long way away it is a slightly different matter though.

I haven't posted what I consider to be on of my most evocative shots of India on this site because it shows women washing on the ghats. I took the picture from a very long way away, not quite knowing what I was snapping. When it came back I felt the picture showed life 'full on', but perhaps too personally to be public.

But there we go, the world would most definately be poorer without the camera.

Sorry, if this is a little rambling or confused - I'm a little drunk at this moment.

Take care all

RTP

PS And as you see from my gallery the only shot of me 'posed' is standing in front of an avalanche that came within a couple of seconds of killing me. (And there is a picture a friend took of me asleep).

PPS I'll try and add more sensible and sober thoughts tomorrow!