Prema Jayakumar

Holiday photographs in an older age were of the places, the monuments, the scenery. With the camera being operated by the (usually) only person in the group who was able to handle it, photographs of people were rarer. Now, of course, the shoe is on the other foot. All the holiday photographs have the people in pride of place with the background just giving validity to the shot. The sight itself is of less importance, at least in the photograph, than the fact that you were there seeing it.

A lot of us laugh with rather a superior air about the tourists who go to different places, only to stand before a monument and get their photograph taken. It is said, maybe with some exaggeration, that certain tour operators promise to take you to seven countries in ten days and so on. Those tours of course give you time for only those photo opportunities so that you can say that you had gone there, you had seen this monument or that. Those are at one extreme end of the spectrum. There are others which are immersive in nature where you spend time in one place, getting to know the place, the people and the environment intimately. You can call it eco-tourism, village-tourism or what have you. There are also those intensely physical holidays which stretch you to the limit, adventurous holidays that take you to extreme places, engaged in activities that border on the dangerous. But, even as we laugh, don’t we do the same thing?

Whatever be the type of the holiday, one thing they have in common is that they are all documented in photographs. The ubiquity of the camera in the mobile phone and the ease in sharing that the social media give are probably the major reasons for this. The photographs very often have to be filled in by imagination and report. The tiny figure dangling on straps may or may not be your friend who celebrated her seventieth birthday bungee-jumping, but you take that on faith. But by the very fact that the photographs are there, the person on holiday also becomes a part of the spectacle, posing appropriately. This applies even if you are travelling alone, and the photographs are selfies. We become performance artists as well as well as spectators when we travel and document those travels. The problem is that places also become fashionable and unfashionable and lots of people end up going to the same places. You want something different to be remembered from your trip and so the performance element creeps in. Instead of staid stand up photos, you find people clowning, gesturing, holding dance poses – anything other than a simple stance which marks your presence there.

I can remember a childhood where a holiday meant spending time with people, telling stories, playing games, and seeing places sometimes, but rarely documenting anything. There are shared memories though of those times spent together and enjoyed. No, I’m not yielding to that pernicious thing, nostalgia and saying that those times were better. They were just different. The times were different, the resources available were different, travel was not easy and distances seemed very great. One did not set out on a long journey without considerable thought and preparation. Where travel was concerned, the old days weren’t particularly good at all.

Travel is so much easier now. You can go almost anywhere in the world. Even money is not as big a constraint as we would think. The doubts arise from this performance element. You have gone to a place, well known or otherwise, to see something, to experience something. But even in the act of seeing, you are being documented as someone who sees. How does that affect your simple act of taking in a natural spectacle, an unusual dance performance, a wild animal in its own atmosphere? Do you concentrate on presenting yourself as the performing artist or are you just the spectator? From photographs seen recently (of celebrations as well as travel) the performance element seems very strong.

What I wonder is whether this reduces the impact of the place you are visiting, your experience of it? If you are being conscious of your presence there, does the ‘there’ get reduced to just a background? A subject for pondering, right?