Business or First – dreads going to the airport. To add insult to injury – or, more exactly, guilt to discomfort – we are now acutely conscious of the cost to the environment, of the way that air travel is contributing to global warming. In this context a stay-at-home like Fernando Pessoa seems almost visionary: ‘What is travel and what use is it? All sunsets are sunsets; there is no need to go and see one in Constantinople.’
It’s not just the sunsets. When people do travel to Constantinople – or anywhere else for that matter – they can increasingly expect to find many of the things and conveniences taken for granted at home. Back in the 1950s the Swiss tourist Robert Frank travelled through America photographing ‘the kind of civilization born here and spreading everywhere’. Frank was right: forty years down the line Parr finds bits and pieces of the American imperium everywhere. (He also records the contrary tendency whereby one no longer has to travel to Egypt – with the attendant threat of terror – to experience the Orient; it can be found in Las Vegas, in the shape of the Luxor.) In order to escape the tentacles of this homogenising ‘civilisation’ it is necessary to travel further and further afield. And by so doing you drag those tentacles after you. We are all responsible for the ruination we lament. Wherever you travel some kind of industry develops to cater for you – even if it’s not the kind of catering you, personally, were hoping for. A couple of years ago my wife and I travelled to Jaisalmer in the desert of Rajasthan, a place she remembered as being almost Calvino-esque in its isolated beauty. In the decade since her first visit, however, it had been incrementally trashed. With every wall festooned with Indo tat – sarongs, knick-knacks, junk – it resembled nothing else so much as a fortified reincarnation of Camden market. In a cruel twist to the familiar story of how the indigenous people of a place (‘Indians’ as they were referred to throughout the Americas) traded the wealth of their land for a few worthless trinkets, the people of Jaisalmer, having put their heritage in hock, were left selling worthless trinkets that no one wanted – and, as a result, we, the tourists, felt cheated by the commerce that had sprung up to pander to us.
The effects of tourism are, of course, not uniform. Not all places have given themselves over entirely to tourism. But, as Mary McCarthy wrote almost half a century ago, ‘there is no use pretending that the tourist Venice is not the real Venice, which is possible with other cities – Rome or Florence or Naples. The tourist Venice is Venice … Venice is a folding picture-post-card of itself.’
Venice is an extreme case. Even in Rome or Florence, however, visitors feel reassured by the way there are so many others doing, seeing – and photographing – the same things. Off-putting to some, a restaurant offering a ‘Tourist Menu’ is tempting to many. At the risk of being racist, the Japanese – the ‘lens-faced Japanese’, in Martin Amis’ phrase – seem to take particular comfort in being photographed in places where everyone else is being photographed. People go to places not to see the places but to obtain evidence – photographs of themselves – of having been there. (Actually, this argument has been rehearsed so many times that it’s a negative version of the same tendency. By making the point I am effectively making a record of myself standing in front of a cultural edifice signifying superior worth and discernment.)
Parr takes things a logical stage further: photographing people being photographed and taking photographs. In this respect the Small World pictures stand comparison with the large-scale images by Thomas Struth, in which we look at visitors looking at famous works of art (which, lest we forget, are also tourist attractions). The difference is that whereas in Struth’s photographs the greatness – or aura or whatever you want to call it – of these artworks survives the process of mediation, in Parr’s ‘place’ and visitor work to their mutual diminution. Tacitly – or maybe not even tacitly – he endorses the verdict of the narrator in Don DeLillo’s The Names:
Tourism is the march of stupidity. You’re expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travellers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don’t know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm.
Like DeLillo, Parr is not scathing or moralistic about this perceived failing. He enjoys it too much for that. There’s too much mileage in it.
It is as hard for photographers to be funny as it is for a critic to explain a joke (this probably has something to do with the medium’s defining quality of reproducibility; how many jokes can withstand infinite repetition?) but they can be witty. The wittiest photographer was Henri Cartier-Bresson (with Winogrand a close second), who, if he had worked in colour, might have relied on some of the same devices as Parr. Ironically, it was at the opening of Small World in Paris in 1995 that Cartier-Bresson told Parr that he must be ‘from a different planet’. One sees what he means but one also sees that, at some point in their orbits, their two planets are thrown into unexpected alignment. In the random accidents of colour Parr contrives to find a version of the rhymes and puns that Cartier-Bresson discovered in the fleeting symmetries of pictorial geometry.
Are Parr’s visual jokes at the expense of the people depicted? Is he fair? In the context of a world in which war photographers are snatching images of death, maiming, grief and suffering Parr’s trespasses are easily forgiven. (Having mentioned war it’s worth remembering that, since Parr works in some of the most intensively photographed spots on earth, he can probably claim immunity on the grounds that they are, to use a phrase from Vietnam, free-fire zones.) I suspect, also, that the people in the photographs would recognise themselves and their fellow-travellers. They would agree that, although they have chosen and paid to come to these places, sightseeing in particular and holidaying generally are often the opposite of fun – partly because of all the other tourists. (Like car drivers moaning about traffic, the discerning tourist often complains that a place is ‘too touristy’.) And the money, even in supposedly cheap places, slips through your fingers like water. Forty years on, my father is still traumatised by the extraordinary price of the choc-ice we almost bought outside Madame Tussaud’s during that trip to London. In this respect he has something in common with D.H. Lawrence, who, in Sea and Sardinia, is in a state of constant fury about being overcharged: ‘I am thoroughly sick to death of the sound of liras … Liras – liras – liras – nothing else. Romantic, poetic, cypress-and-orange-tree Italy is gone. Remains an Italy smothered in the filthy smother of innumerable lira notes: ragged, unsavoury paper money so thick upon the air that one breathes it like some greasy fog.’
There is no way round it: to travel, either as backpacker or package tourist, is to be forced into being an incessant consumer. Factor in queues, hassle, jetlag and tummy upsets and it’s a wonder, even now, when travel has become so easy, that people still want to do it. Philip Larkin certainly didn’t want to, but he did consent, every year, to take his mother away for a dismal week somewhere in England (he didn’t believe in ‘abroad’). The experience led him to develop ‘a theory [that] “holidays” evolved from the medieval pilgrimage, and are essentially a kind of penance for being so happy and comfortable in one’s daily life’.
That’s what the pictures in Small World depict: the form and state of modern, faithless pilgrimage. I think, next year, I might try Mecca.
2007
Joel Sternfeld’s Utopian Visions
One of the most moving photographs I know is also one of the dullest: an empty, uninteresting-looking room with a brown carpet and beige walls. It comes at the end of Joel Sternfeld’s book On This Site (1996). On each of the previous recto pages is a colour photo of an ordinary bit of America: a street corner, a rural grocery store (reminiscent of ones photographed by Walker Evans in the 1930s), an urban hotel, a deserted highway. On each of the facing pages a brief text explains that this is, respectively: the place in Queens where a woman was stabbed
