From a young age I have been perplexed by a specific brand of tourism. A particular type of sightseer in museums. They walk up to some priceless, timeless, boundless masterpiece. They photograph it, photograph the little plaque next to it and move on; seeing only through the screen of their digital camera the paint’s little ripples riffling over the canvas, see the color catch the light soft-fingered and lovingly, feel the composition click something together in their mind always there but always unconnected. I once saw these tourists as some proof of my own superiority. Look at the plebeians sheepishly moving from masterwork to magnum opus, not seeing the true beauty of the world, unlike me, a horribly pretentious twelve-year-old who likes this painting because the museum brochure said it’s good. The vanity of teendom. By now I’ve learned that my love of spending a good fifteen minutes in front of a painting I like doesn’t elevate me above anyone else. We all enjoy different things in different ways. I’m sure I don’t appreciate mountains of things as much as others believe they deserve. Cars. Pop-art. Slow French films. Other stuff I never really got. The right road to enjoyment isn’t signposted or lit or dictated by snobs. But it still confounds me. What is the point of the picture? Of that photo of the Mona Lisa or the Eiffel Tower? You can find at least five-thousand better pictures of what you’ve just photographed in one Google search. I understand photographing the plaque to remember the title and the painter, but why photograph both? Why photograph the London Eye? Why take a picture already taken a billion times? Why do you need to take this picture? What is the meaning of the picture once it’s taken? Does it even have a meaning at all?
Viewed from the outside in, I have found three reasons for taking these pictures. Firstly, the picture is a declaration of having been, having seen. Like carving your name into the Great Wall of China. These great paintings, great cathedrals, great mountain ranges, are rites of passage on the road to becoming well-traveled. As Twain taught, classic literature is “something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” Almost nobody actually wants to read Chaucer, Dante, Virgil, or Homer. Ah, but to be the person that has read Chaucer, Dante, Virgil, and Homer, that’d be something. Perhaps some of the world’s wonders are like this too. You are now a person that has been to Rome, the Louvre, Barcelona, and the Grand Canyon. You are well traveled, you really are somebody, and you have photographic proof.
The second, and most obvious motivation to take such pictures is to share the photos with other people. A less cynical answer. You see something marvelous and you wish to share some small sliver of this beauty with your loved ones. Cameras rarely catch even the afterglow of the world’s true beauty but maybe the people you care about will still be warmed by it a little. A worthy reason for taking a picture. More cynically, people might take these pictures to promote envy in their Instagram followers. To present some image of themselves as an always gleeful and wide-eyed doe coddled eternally by the beauty of the world. Or some ever-nonchalant sunglassed explorer yawning at another otherworldly marvel. What are you doing at 3AM on a Tuesday? I am in Milan having a Mai Tai in a 14th century Gothic Cathedral, of course.
But why take so many pictures? And of paintings? Of painting-plaques? Of that Cathedral ceiling? To share with loved ones or people you’re trying to impress? Or perhaps, is it to share with a third possible party? Yourself. Yourself in the future, to be precise. To look back through your gallery in the coming weeks, months, and years, and smile then at what you now see.
A tangent; I believe humans are inherently unequipped to fully enjoy life. The world, while cruel, and mean, and dark, is incomprehensibly beautiful. Everywhere you look are things so magnificently gorgeous they deserve a lifetime of attention. Every evening, a surreally big ball of fire plunges playfully into red and orange of its own making. Cloud-masses the size of cities hover overhead and gleam gilded like Gods. At night, light that has traveled longer than we’ll live polkadots the pitch blackness like freckles. Water that rushes crystalline over limestone. The color maroon. Or feelings, any feelings, what unbelievably amazing things. The cold on your tongue when you take a sharp and short breath in. Warm showers. That slight tinge of nausea when the bus tilts down a hillside-road. How your limbs hang heavy after too little sleep. Restlessness that makes your fingers shiver like engine-pistons. The pride of helping someone. Love. If the world could hit us in the enormity of its true beauty, if we felt all of it as fully as possible, we would faint, scream, cry, or shit ourselves every second of every day. But reality arrives within us dampened and hampered by the smallness of ourselves, by our ease of disturbance. Fears, worries, distractions, recollections, and survival instincts, they shield us from our enshrinements like the world’s sturdiest glass wall.
A single moment cannot be enjoyed to the extent it deserves. This is doubly true when standing in front of something tourists tend to photograph. But if one could record a moment and relive it twice, or thrice, or a hundred times, maybe just maybe, we can do it the justice it deserves. That is what tourist photography could be.
Moreover, taking these pictures alleviates the pressure of having to enjoy the moment. Seeing something as amazing as the Colosseum ought to make you pass out on the spot. But almost no one actually feels so fully. I always feel a little guilty about this. I should be enjoying this more. I should feel more, be happier. This is why I like airplane food. It cannot be good. You aren’t supposed to enjoy it. Just consume it. Unlike fine dining, I can eat it without any remorse over not having tasted it properly, or at all. Smiling, guiltlessly, I inhale the subpar chicken masala and the soggy rice.
But unlike airplane food, you are supposed to enjoy your vacation sights. You paid a great deal for it, and every person you’ve ever met has told you it’s amazing. Taking pictures shifts the stress of mandatory enjoyment to a later date. It’ll be something tomorrow you can deal with, when they look back at all those pictures; and you in a few months, accidentally finding yourself neck-deep in your digital gallery; and you in a few years, in a haze of happy memories and pretty pictures. And maybe if all those versions come together, they can actually feel as much as they ought to.
This also helps answer the question ‘what does vacation photography mean?’. Traditionally, photographic meaning, outside of staged photography, is said to come from choice of subject. Like Van Gogh declaring that ordinary, working-class life is as much worth painting as biblical scenes, or Wordsworth arguing poetry can be written in everyday English, not just the language of kings and academics, the street photographer declares streets are worth photographing. The overlooked is worthy of remembrance. Quite the meaning for any art piece. But there are genres of art where this act of meaning-endowment is not present. Firstly, war photography. Of course war is worth photographing, it is the most horrendous thing humanity ever invented, the heightening and condensing of everything cruel and terrible about the world into a single event. Only a fool would believe it to be not worthy of photography. Where does meaning then come from, if it doesn’t come from the choice of subject matter? It comes from danger. War photographers risk their life, and often die, in the act of photographing. War is worth photographing, of course, but saying these pictures are worth your own life: that is meaning, if ever there was any. Then there is paparazzi-celebrity-photography. The meaning does not come from the choice of subject matter as it does in street photography, it comes from supply and demand. The photographer only finds their subjects worthy of being photographed because a larger public does, and is willing to pay for it. Its meaning is pure commerce. Like AI slop or anything Damien Hirst does.
Finally, vacation photography. Again, the meaning does not come from the choice of subject matter. Naturally, sights are worth photographing, that’s why you’re on vacation there. The photographer also does not actually believe their photographing is an act of bringing attention to the unwitnessed. There is no danger. There is also very little commerce going on. What is the meaning, then?
These pictures are a declaration that the world is beautiful, despite the fact that we cannot truly enjoy it, or that everyone already knows it’s beautiful, or has seen it already; it’s just gorgeous. In a way, these pictures are like small talk. Innocuous, meaningless, pointless. But, as Louis Armstrong sang of such conversations in What A Wonderful World, when you pay attention, they’re really sayin’, ‘I love you’.
Picture taken by the writer in Granada, Spain
Written by Arthur Mulder
Writer's Block Magazine 
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