Photographing tourists taking photos at Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia. Photo by David Thompson.The Salar de Uyuni tour in Bolivia is one of the obligatory stops in the South American tourist trail. A trip through a series of deserts, surreal rock formations, geysers, bright pink lakes with flocks of flamingos, culminating in a journey through the world’s largest salt flats, it is certainly one of the most bizarre, psychedelic landscapes on earth. Of course, given its visual advantages it’s also a potential smorgasbord of perspective-trick photos, where you can shoot yourself balancing on an orange, or standing on someone’s shoulder, whispering into their ear, or crushing someone under your foot. Think of it as the South American equivalent of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, with everyone trying to keep the tower up with their hands. In the salt flats you step out of your 4×4 and the next hour is race to think of the most creative photo you can make from the sea of white and blue.Of course, as in Pisa, you shoot the scene even a few centimetres off, and suddenly the photo makes no sense. In fact, the image represents the view of no-one. It’s a memory you never actually experienced. Going through Uyuni made me start thinking about how we make these images. No matter whether in a salt flat or a city, a beach or a cemetery, we are inseparable from our cameras, yet the images are always removed from our own experience. It’s easy to dismiss it all as part of the fake, superficial nature of tourism itself, which is what most backpackers do. But it’s very easy for me to criticise backpackers, since we spend so much time criticising each other. So instead, I am going to try thinking more constructively about the whole thing.Everyone travels with cameras. Why? This is not a particularly recent phenomenon; the idea of taking a holiday without snapping photos has seemed unthinkable for many decades, and anthropologists and other social scientists have been studying the relationship between tourism and photography since the late seventies [1]. Photography has been with us for over a century, transforming our relationship with images – as Stewart Ewen argues, during the twentieth century we have become saturated with images which have become crucial in how we build our own identities, often becoming more important than the objects they are supposed to represent [2]. But technology also changes rapidly. The idea of travelling around with rolls of film, developing them only once you’ve returned home, and dutifully arranging them in albums to share with friends and family has rapidly become extinct. Not only digital photography but also Facebook (and more recently Instagram) have transformed how we take photos. It is a more instantly social activity, allowing people from all around the world to see our journeys and comment on them. It’s a way we can share our journeys and maintain a conversation with the world back home. [Read the rest of the article]: Happy snaps: A photo essay on photographyAuthor informationDavid ThompsonUniversity of Sydney at University of SydneyDavid Thompson has been travelling around South America since he completed his final-year undergraduate thesis on cosmopolitanism and consumption in Latin America at The University of Sydney, Australia, in late 2010. He has blogged about his ethnographic observations on the Occupy Rio movement, materiality and cosmopolitanism, and the vicissitudes of tourism on the Material World Blog and on Erin B. Taylor's blog.Original article: Happy snaps: A photo essay on photography©2013 PopAnth - Hot Buttered Humanity. All Rights Reserved.
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