Photography Analysis

Tourism is a good representation for photography. Every year people travel away from their homes, breaking their daily routines to visit other locations. It is almost unnatural to go on vacation without a camera. Tourists snap pictures of everything to record and prove that they have been to some location. These pictures serve as memories later for the tourists. Photography and tourism are in a sense intertwined. Photography is the mechanism by which tourism can be documented. Photographs play a major role in people’s vacation. Tourists want to capture the environment surrounding them, the culture they are immersed in, the activities they perform, and the individuals enjoying the vacation with them. These photographs serve as constant reminders
When looking at a photograph, one may recall what is shown in the picture and the events surrounding it. Susan Sontag states that “the very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.” (Sontag 10) the older one gets and the more one has traveled the less likely they are to remember correctly the places they have traveled to and the details surrounding a certain trip. Taking photographs is soothing because you have captured on film permanently what you want to always remember and as you forget one has to just simply look at a photograph and memories come flooding back into one’s mind. The idea of traveling to another place and documenting it is very intriguing to many tourists. Individuals tend to be very curious beings. Thus this is why they travel to other locations, to see new environments and to examine how others live. People have always been curious to see how others go about their daily lives. For instance we have magazines every where displaying pictures of celebrities doing routine tasks such as walking the dog to the more bizarre such as shaving their
The words used to describe taking a photograph like aim and shoot make the camera seem more like a gun. Sontag states that “armed with their machines, photographers are to make an assault on reality.” (Sontag 121) This completely describes what tourists have done with the American Indians. Another aggressive side of photography is what Sontag called the machine gun approach. It is when “many negatives are made with the hope that one will be good-is fatal to serious results.” (Sontag 117) Tourists do this to seize the reality that they are visiting in the hopes of taking a chunk back home with