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“
It seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera along. Photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had.
” Susan Sontag (1973) p9
As a photographer and traveler, I am fully cognizant of my role as tourist. Working from within, my objective is to convey an experience of being a tourist in the early part of the twenty first century. In doing this I am interested in observing how the camera determines our activities and postures as we interact and move through sightseeing destinations, how this drive to create imagery of our experiences has seemed to have grown with the addition of digital technology and our ability to transmit and archive these endless pictures.
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By comparing three examples of a “real” Venice experience, which I created between
1988 and 2006, I will examine the role the camera plays in shaping and directing touristic pursuits. I will also address issues surrounding the fabricated and commodified offerings that are photographed and consumed at the site, the meanings inherent in the resulting images and the changing activity of photography itself. These works were shot at the
EPCOT Center, Disney World, Florida, USA (1988), The Venetian Hotel and Casino,
Las Vegas, USA 2002 and the original Venice in Italy 2006.
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Almost as soon as the ink dried on Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) and Louis Daguerre’s
(1787-1851) 1839 photographic patents, photography has evolved hand in hand with tourism. From the beginning, photographers brought back to the public, images that provided proof of the unseen, visualized the “exotic” and documented activities that were undertaken in far off locations.
In this humorous lithograph by Théodore Maurise from 1840 only one year after the invention of photography, he projects a future with mass produced cameras, aerial photography and the “demise of engravers who are invited to rent gallows … on which to end their useless lives.” 1
1 1
Warner Marien, Mary Photography A cultural history Syracuse University, Syracuse
New York, Prentice Hall, Inc and Harry Abrams, Inc. Publishers 2002) p.26

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In the details of the scenes you can see a man in a traveling suit carrying a box camera and sign that says “
Appareil Portatif Pour Le Voyage
” (portable camera for the trip), In the center of the print, you can see the gallows with hanging victims surrounded by long lines of cameras being carried by all possible means to a train and boat in the background being loaded up with it’s new cargo ready for export.
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The public in the mid 19 th
century, not unlike today, had in their mind an ideal of what they thought legendary edifices and locations should look like. Largely informed at that time by paintings and prints, the picturesque was what was expected and photographers fulfilled their wishes by bringing back photographic images, often destined to be reproduced by means of engravings, that evoked and confirmed the feelings and the aesthetics of which they already knew. Egypt, Greece and the Holy Land were amongst the first places to be documented by European photographers such as Pierre –Gustave
Joly de Lotbinère (1798 – 1865) as in this example and anonymous photographers who contributed daguerreotypes to Noel Marie Paymal Lerebours (1807-1873) multi-volume publication of adjusted and perfected engravings entitled Excursions Daguerriennes, representant les vues at les monuments le plus remarquables di globe ( Daguerrian
Excursions, Showing the World’s Most Remarkable Views and Monuments) 2
published in France between 1841 and 1844.
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By the turn of the 20 th century photography was a part of everyday life. Images had begun their ubiquitous influence on our society’s subconscious. From newspapers and periodicals to family portraits, post cards and stereographs, photographs were shaping ideas about our own personal family histories and for Europeans and North Americans it was also instilling a colonial knowledge of the world.
2 IBID p.26

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Foreign locations and images of the “other” circulated around the globe via these new publications and other photographic media such as the very popular stereographs complete with 3’D viewers that found their place in most middle class parlors.
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By 1900, post cards from around the world were depicting just about anything that could be photographed from set up shots of humorous narrative tableaus and soft pornography to exotic locations and pictures of “natives” in romanticized scenes and costumes. They were not only being sent by travelers but were sold and collected. Thus firmly embedding the colonial view of the exotic other, into minds of Westerners for many generations to come. Businesses such as the Detroit Publishing Company printed some 7 million postcard images a year from about 1898 until 1920
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With the development of commercially prepared papers, faster films, and smaller, easy to use cameras, photography became accessible to the common person. Kodak’s slogan referring to it’s first cameras that came filled with film “You Press the Button – We do the rest” enticed people to carry a camera and make spontaneous shots in a way that had not been done before.” 4
Ordinary people began taking cameras along on their trips, creating their own personal histories and idealizing edited experience and locations into interpretations of reality.
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Over the last 175 years a greater and greater portion of people in the world have become familiar with almost everywhere else in the world, not only through the ever growing bombardment of photographic images, both moving and still, that fill our daily lives but also through a myriad of recreations of these famous places.
3
New York Public Library Digital Gallery http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?col_id=164
4
Warner Marien, Mary Photography A cultural history Syracuse University, Syracuse
New York, Prentice Hall, Inc and Harry Abrams, Inc. Publishers 2002) p.169

This brings me to my 2 nd
, but related issue The fabricated Experience. –
Today, before we ever visit the Eiffel Tower, the Champe Elysee , or Venice, we know what they look like, where they are and have a mediated and probably idealized impression of what they must be like. In Dean MacCannell’s seminal publication The
Tourist, A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976) he discusses sites that have become famous or legendary. That is they have become symbols of themselves and the meanings that have been built up around them are mythic.
Simulations of these places and edifices from around the world found in OTHER places around the world are “real” illustrations of Jean Baudrillard’s theories on the meanings around simulacra. Commercial entertainment places such as miniature worlds are their own destinations with admission fees, Kodak picture spots and souvenirs. Experiential interpretations of sites such as these are determined by the producer for commercial and or political purposes.
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The EPCOT Center
The EPCOT Center, Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, is one of the theme parks situated within Disney World’s over 111 square Kilometer complex in
Central Florida, USA. A visit to Disney’s EPCOT is a visit to the future and the four corners of the world all in one day.
Future World, the first section of EPCOT, is a collection of modernistic pavilions, displaying the World of Tomorrow or rather, corporate America’s version of how its technologies will shape the direction of the earth’s future. Mega corporations like
AT&T, Exxon, Nestlé and Kodak, sponsor the space age architectural feats, which are designed to feed information to the masses of people who passively file through their awe inspiring displays of American technological triumphs and amazing achievements for the future.
Moving on into the past, guests are directioned over a bridge to World Showcase, a compilation of eleven nostalgic ethnic pavilions. Constructed in the fashion of a permanent world’s fair, these pseudo-communities are spaced along a 2 km promenade, which encircles a 41 acre man-made lagoon. . It is ironic that for EPCOT - Experimental

Prototype Community of Tomorrow, the Disney Imagineers only chose historical and rather mythic architectural signifiers to create a pastiche of the “essence’ ( to use their word) of each country. These editorialized montages of sanitized, commodified and
Americanized signs are easily recognized and Disney makes no secrets about their fabrication. To quote Umberto Eco from Travels in Hyperreality “… Once the ‘total fake ‘ is admitted, in order to be enjoyed it must seem totally real … because the public is meant to admire the perfection of the fake.”
Everywhere through Disney World there are instructions of where to point your camera to get the best angle to recreate their recreations in your photographs to generate your future memories and stories.
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A visit to The EPCOT Center is like walking into a Hollywood film. Or better still, it is like being inside of a 3 -dimensional television set. The convincing ambiance is uncanny, right down to the accent of the employees brought in from abroad to provide the right ethnic experience while you dine or shop for authentic souvenirs, which Disney also imports to complete the setting.
The Italy Pavilion is based largely on famous buildings that are found on the Piazza San
Marco
, St. Marks Square in Venice, a scaled down version of the Doge’s Palace, the
Campanile or Bell Tower and the 2 columns topped with the Winged Lion of Venice and
St Theodore atop a crocodile. There are gondola’s (just for show), Italian style street performers, a Venetian glass store and
This is a straight photograph of the pavilion.
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This slide is a digital montage of my version of Disney’s Italian pavilion It was part of a larger exhibition/installation which I called The EPCOT Center, America
Appropriates the World . It had 6 others large works representing other pavilions and a sound track. The objective was to convey an experience of the Center through the impressions and thoughts I had over the course of a number of visits over a few years.

The Disney buildings, signs, and all logos are rendered in color while the visitors are in black and white. The photographer and shopper with the Disney bag appeared in all of the pieces. The work is not a reproduction of exactly what it looked like from a certain angle, or even one recommended by Disney, but a compilation of viewpoints seamed together to recreate an overall reference to a series of views and encounters within the space. A fabricated memory such as the one anyone might create from a hand full of disjointed pictures seamed together in their mind.
I am only going to show the Italian work.
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This is an unmanipulated photograph of the pavilion.
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You can see the changes I made which include interiors views of the space.
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Here you can see the Kodak Direction sign, the photographer and the shopper. In the corner is a shot of the real Venice in Italy for comparison.
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Inadvertently over the years, I have also recorded changes in technology. Here is a video camera (the picture was taken in 1987 or 1988) that required a strong shoulder and an upright posture.
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Gondolas

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Back in the 80’s I thought that I had experienced the ultimate in spuriousness and commodification.. Now the EPCOT center pales in comparison to the ultra ultimate. I couldn’t even imagine the future Las Vegas in Nevada, USA.
The occasion for my 2002 visit was the Annual conference of the Society of
Photographic Education. How perfect.
Las Vegas is no longer the city of glizzy neon signs. Most of the famous ones are gone.
In their place, hyperreal buildings that look like they have been picked up from around the world, cleaned up and plopped down in the middle of the crowds and 24 hour traffic, have now become extravagant signs and signifiers in their own right. An Egyptian pyramid, the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty all compete for attention on the streetscape with the Venetian Hotel and Casino.
The Venetian Casino and Hotel opened in 1999. The brain child of billionaire Sheldon
Aldelson it was built in about 2 years.(still being expanded) Far larger and much more elaborate than any of Disney’s fabrications, it boasts almost full scale renditions of the
Ducal Palace, the Piazzetta, the Campanile, Clock Tower, Rialto Bridge, segments of
Piazza San Marco and 365 meters of canals complete with gondolas and singing gondoliers. It is also a pastiche in it’s own original configuration. From a quote in Davis and Marvin’s book “ Venice, The Tourist Maze, A cultural critique of the World’s most
Touristed city
”, the Venetian offers
“ a transported, distillation of the Most Romantic City in the World , carrying the most profound and disturbing implications . In a sense , Adelson has rendered
Venice irrelevant no longer necessary to visit because his “Venice” is more accessible to the American tourist in their own country with roomy, high quality hotel rooms” P 285
The simulation doesn’t stop with the façade. The immersion into this fantasy is made complete by the “authenticity” of the interior experience of course all centered around the consumption of goods or gambling

that actually challenges gambling for the biggest attraction.
This brings me to this most recent project. Viewers walk into the reconstruction of my
Venice experience and are confronted by a number of slightly larger than life freestanding tourists photographing the scene with their digital cameras or mobile phones. They hear the sounds of laughter and hints of voices speaking in many languages, snippets of familiar old Italian songs and pigeons flapping through the air. On the opposing walls are two very large digital montages of famous Piazza views, one looking towards the Basilica of St Mark, the other looking out onto the Grand Canal through the two columns surmounted by the Lion of St Mark, and St Theodore atop the crocodile. Both scenes are filled with tourists, photographing, posing, shopping and playing with the thousands of pigeons that seem to be there just for their entertainment.
i
They are taking pictures with all sorts of recording devices both moving and still, and also, reviewing and editing their instant digital histories in the images they have just taken.
When I was in Venice I visited the Accademia Gallery and was quite taken by Gentile
Bellini’s 1496 painting
Procession of the Relic of the True Cross in the Piazza San
Marc o. It was uncanny how similar it looked then with its crowds filling the space in front of the Basilica.
When I was thinking about how to depict my experience and impressions of the visit, I decided to embed segments of the painting into my work. There are places where photographs of the Basilica and the Campanile merge invisibly with scans from the painting, and religious figures from the procession are set into the crowds. One of the monks standing in front of the scene gazes over the shoulder of a trendy looking tourist onto the screen of his mobile phone.

Bibliography
Bryman, Alan, (1995) Disney and his Worlds Routledge , London
Birnbaum, Steve, (1990) Walt Disney World, The Official Guide, Avon Books & Hearst
Professional Magazines Inc. Willard, Ohio
Davis, Robert C. Marvin, Garry R. (2004). Venice The Tourist Maze A Cultural Critique of the World’s Most Touristed City University
of California Press, Berkley and Los
Angeles, California.
Gernsheim, Helmut and Alison, A Concise History of Photography ( 1971) Thames and
Hudson, London
MacCannell, Dean (1976).
The Tourist A new Theory of the Leisure Class.
Schocken
Books, New York.
Sontag, Susan On Photography (1977) Delta Publishing Co. Inc. New York.
Warner Marien, Mary (2002). Photography A cultural history Syracuse University,
Syracuse New York, Prentice Hall, Inc and Harry Abrams, Inc. Publishers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epcot#Future_World_Pavilions i Davis, Robert C., Marvin, Garry, R, (2004) Venice and the Tourist Maze A Cultural Critique of the
Worlds Most Touristed City, University of California Press, Berkley and Los Angeles, California p76-77