Introduction: Fact or Fable? Early Travel Photography and the Challenge of Interpretation
At the end of a three-week cruise on the Nile in the winter of 1894, Thomas Cook & Son—the world’s first tour company—invited passengers to purchase a large souvenir portfolio containing twenty-seven photographs of Egypt. While most of the photos depict ancient ruins, one is of a company steamer, the Rameses the Third, which carried tourists up and down the river. The British travelers who sailed on it would have recalled that ten years earlier, Cook’s “fleet” had carried not sightseers, but soldiers enroute from Cairo to Khartoum to relieve General Charles Gordon and his men, besieged by a Sudanese army. Though the military side of the expedition failed, Cook & Son owed much of its later success to the capital it built up transporting soldiers and supplies. More broadly, the incident serves as a reminder that tourism and colonialism in the Middle East (and elsewhere) were closely linked.
In a more subtle way, the portfolio of photographs that Cook & Son sold to its customers reinforced this complex relationship. Years earlier, the company’s founder had remarked that “To travel is to dispel the mists of fable, clear the mind of prejudice taught from babyhood, and facilitate perfectness of seeing eye to eye.” Cook’s words certainly ring true. That said, did early travel photographers share this lofty ideal? A growing body of scholarship suggests that in many cases, the answer is “no.” Rather than attempt to present a neutral or at least balanced image of foreign peoples and cultures, photographers—for various reasons and not necessarily with ill intent—often deliberately obscured their subjects in the “mists of fable” that Thomas Cook dreamed of clearing away. At times, the images also supported powerful business interests which stood to profit from a carefully constructed view of distant lands they had set their sights on.
This exhibition explores the larger social and political context of photographs created between about 1870 and 1920 as tourist souvenirs or to promote tourism in areas that few Europeans or Americans had ever visited just for fun. Like all art, the photos displayed here are open interpretation. In one sense, they reflect Western eagerness to experience foreign cultures and even to appreciate and admire them. That eagerness, it is important to note, brought much-needed money and investment to the communities where these images were made. Seen from a different angle, however, tourist photography invariably played up difference rather than commonality and perpetuated the stereotypes that underpinned Western economic and cultural imperialism. It also concealed the fact that some parts of the world opened their doors to tourism almost out of necessity and afterwards had an uneasy relationship with it. Egypt, for example, struggled to pay back loans it took from European powers in the nineteenth century. In tourism, local leaders saw a way to stimulate the economy, even if it meant having to tolerate oversimplified views of local life, history, and culture.
There is an old saying that the camera never lies. We all know it isn’t true, and yet every day, we encounter photographs—in the news, in social media, in marketing—which we do not ask enough questions of, and which may be misleading. Looking Abroad is an opportunity to practice viewing photos with a critical eye. Why were these pictures created? What are your initial assumptions about the people or places portrayed? Does more information fundamentally change the way you see the images? Whether you are looking at photographs from long ago or just yesterday, these are important questions to ask.
