Saturday, February 02, 2008
beyond the photograph
(Note: I know the topics I'll be mentioning are a bit old, but I never got around to posting this.)
Do places have "aura"? Tourism is one of the largest industries in the world, and I'm one of those people who fall helplessly in love with a foreign place despite not having physically been there before. The past winter break, I had my first trip to Europe.
Upon arriving at my first destination of Rome, the initial excitement of finally being able to visit the EU after many years of desiring, but not attaining, died down rather quickly, and the little annoyances of travelling started to get the best of me. The graffiti-laden walls that lined the streets, the traffic that didn't have much regard for pedestrians, the endless cobblestone streets that looked amazing but killed my feet due to the unevenness -- everything just seemed exacerbated. I even started to question why I couldn't bring myself to feel more absorbed in the experience.
Maybe it was just the sheer amount of tourists everywhere I went that made everything less appealing. On Christmas day, I visited the Basilica di San Pietro in Vatican City, and the number of people there for service was minimal, while it was hard to penetrate the crowd to take a look at Michelangelo's Pietà . To most of the people there, the church has probably lost its original meaning, and is a museum exhibiting arcitecture and artwork from centuries ago.
In my opinion, tourists can be divided into two general groups: people who snap photos endlessly trying to get perfect shots of their surroundings, or people who take a couple of photos before enjoying the scenery with their eyes and not the camera lens. I would say I'm part of the former group, and as a photography fanatic, I take pictures of everything -- food, street signs, buildings, floors... There isn't anything that wouldn't make a perfect subject of a photograph.
It's as if I just want to take everything home. But it's impossible to capture everything, no matter how many photos you take. Something is always missing. It could be the three-dimensionality imposed onto a two-dimensional piece of paper or everything that is beyond the edges and can't be seen anymore. Just "something." Maybe it isn't even the photo itself, but the fact that I may have spent too much time with my photos, and not with the "moment," if there actually was one. How do people know they've spent enough time at a tourist attraction anyway?
Looking at the photos again, like one with me standing among the sea of people in front of the Château de Versailles, there isn't really a concrete sense that I was there. All I have to go by is that one photo. Transportation is so convenient these days and people have many choices of when and where to go or to settle. As a tourist, I already started to miss the space I was standing in while I was standing there, because I knew that I wouldn't be there the next day.
Do places have "aura"? Tourism is one of the largest industries in the world, and I'm one of those people who fall helplessly in love with a foreign place despite not having physically been there before. The past winter break, I had my first trip to Europe.
Upon arriving at my first destination of Rome, the initial excitement of finally being able to visit the EU after many years of desiring, but not attaining, died down rather quickly, and the little annoyances of travelling started to get the best of me. The graffiti-laden walls that lined the streets, the traffic that didn't have much regard for pedestrians, the endless cobblestone streets that looked amazing but killed my feet due to the unevenness -- everything just seemed exacerbated. I even started to question why I couldn't bring myself to feel more absorbed in the experience.
Maybe it was just the sheer amount of tourists everywhere I went that made everything less appealing. On Christmas day, I visited the Basilica di San Pietro in Vatican City, and the number of people there for service was minimal, while it was hard to penetrate the crowd to take a look at Michelangelo's Pietà . To most of the people there, the church has probably lost its original meaning, and is a museum exhibiting arcitecture and artwork from centuries ago.
In my opinion, tourists can be divided into two general groups: people who snap photos endlessly trying to get perfect shots of their surroundings, or people who take a couple of photos before enjoying the scenery with their eyes and not the camera lens. I would say I'm part of the former group, and as a photography fanatic, I take pictures of everything -- food, street signs, buildings, floors... There isn't anything that wouldn't make a perfect subject of a photograph.
It's as if I just want to take everything home. But it's impossible to capture everything, no matter how many photos you take. Something is always missing. It could be the three-dimensionality imposed onto a two-dimensional piece of paper or everything that is beyond the edges and can't be seen anymore. Just "something." Maybe it isn't even the photo itself, but the fact that I may have spent too much time with my photos, and not with the "moment," if there actually was one. How do people know they've spent enough time at a tourist attraction anyway?
Looking at the photos again, like one with me standing among the sea of people in front of the Château de Versailles, there isn't really a concrete sense that I was there. All I have to go by is that one photo. Transportation is so convenient these days and people have many choices of when and where to go or to settle. As a tourist, I already started to miss the space I was standing in while I was standing there, because I knew that I wouldn't be there the next day.
# posted by Phoebe H. @ 1:48 AM 
