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Picturing the Camps

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. Thus, photography develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism.… It seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera along.

—Susan Sontag, On Photography (1973)1

Tourists can be conspicuous for many reasons, but nothing marks them more plainly than their cameras. The stereotypical tourist is a lens-wielding traveler on a mission to record anything that appears exotic, historical, or typical of the locale. Most of us who travel with a camera have probably found ourselves fulfilling this cliché, more or less self-consciously, taking pictures of buildings or monuments that have already been photographed a thousand times by other photographers, often with far greater skill than we possess. As the writer Susan Sontag observes, photography and tourism are so mutually enabling that they are hard to imagine without each other.

Picture taking plays a ritualistic role in tourism, so much so that the choice not to photograph something can be as deliberate as the choice to do so.2 Photography is one of the ways the traveler fulfills the journey’s promise of making new memories; it provides a purpose to travel and offers the sightseer a familiar, portable identity. In the midst of an unfamiliar location, photography is a reassuring activity, easing the tourist’s insecurity by helping to incorporate the disorienting experience of unfamiliar places into the practice of everyday life.3 While exotic pictures may reinforce the distinction between home and abroad, the act of pointing the camera, framing the image, and pressing the shutter button is a constant that bridges the experience of travel and home life— a fact made more evident today with the ubiquity of handheld devices with digital cameras. Photography lets tourists extend the travel experience beyond the period of the tour, easing the transition from a time of adventure to the routine of home and work. Whether through the assembly of photo albums, the editing of digital pictures, the slideshow before a captive audience, or self-produced videos, photographic practices posttravel permit a sense of mastery over unfamiliar places, promoting tourism’s gaze well beyond the actual time of the journey and giving tourists the pleasure of virtual travel.4 Sontag’s claim that photography provides the illusion of possession over an “unreal past” (in reference to the idealized representation of family photos) suggests that tourists seek that same sense of possession over place.

If tourists are capable of being sophisticated makers of meaning, as more recent scholarship in tourism studies increasingly contends, then surely photography is one of the means by which they do so. The fun of taking pictures as souvenirs need not obscure the more earnest characterization of tourists as storytellers, documentarists, and ethnographers; as the literary theorist Jonathan Culler has said, “Tourists are the agents of semiotics: all over the world they are engaged in reading cities, landscapes and cultures as sign systems.”5 Tourists are making sense of their travels and, in the process, of their own place in the world.

That is not to say that photography is innocent of its involvement in many problematic touristic behaviors. Think, for example, of the habit some travelers have of spending more time looking through a camera than directly at their surroundings; perhaps they (or we) do so out of a sense of insecurity about what to notice or out of fear of missing something “important.” More troubling, tourists with cameras can be culturally insensitive guests who reduce their hosts to exemplars of the exotic.6 No doubt photography is complicit in tourism’s pursuit of superficial pleasure, which its critics cite as evidence of tourism’s inherent frivolity.7

The sociologist John Urry has highlighted the ways in which the pleasure gained in tourism is deeply visual. For Urry, vision becomes a primary axis along which tourism, the invitation to gaze upon other people and other places without inhibition, rewards travelers with pleasure. In the most recent edition of his canonical book, The Tourist Gaze, Urry, together with the cultural geographer Jonas Larsen, characterizes the centrality of vision in tourism as follows:

Gazes organize the encounters of visitors with the “other”, providing some sense of competence, pleasure, and structure to those experiences. The gaze demarcates an array of pleasurable qualities to be generated within particular times and spaces. It is the gaze that orders and regulates the relationship between the various sensuous experiences while away, identifying what is visually out-of-ordinary, what are relevant differences and what is “other.”8

Urry, like Sontag, identifies seeing with pleasure, though he defines pleasure very broadly to include the intellectual gratification of competence, of having structured experiences; in other words, not simply as an emotional or libidinal response. At the same time, by including the contact between self and other as one form of visual pleasure that can accompany “various sensuous experiences,” Urry also acknowledges the possibility of libidinal—that is, voyeuristic—enjoyment in the tourist gaze, implicating vision as a means by which to exercise power over the other.9

However conceptualized, Urry’s and Sontag’s understanding of the tourist gaze as an exploitative pleasure is difficult to reconcile with the concept of Holocaust tourism as a kind of witnessing that I introduced in the previous chapter. Witnessing locates the tourist within ethical territory, and if pleasure is derived from the act of bearing witness, it should be the pleasure derived from fulfilling a moral obligation, not from getting libidinal satisfaction. The uncertain morality of the gaze reminds us that tourism, to the extent it is a visual practice, is inextricably bound up with an ethical problem that situates our own pleasure in close proximity to our regard for others. Photography is one way the tourist enters this ethically challenged terrain, linking entertainment with obligation to others. Tourists take pictures not only for fun but also to find a sense of proximity to the other, to make real what has been presented as extraordinary.10