28/11/2018
“Commercial tourist photographs arouse desires by staging geographies that thrill and seduce the eye.”
TTG p?
I wonder who responds to the seduction of the tourist photograph?
Who does not say “Es ist so?”
Who says, in fact, “Es ist nicht so!”
Who claims that the photograph is not a representation but a presentation as such, who claims that the photograph is not the thing we know that it is, a paper or screen with dots, and says instead, rather than any of the other many many options of things one might choose the photo to be, “THIS IS NOT A LIE IT IS THE TRUTH OF MY FANTASY”?
It is so.
It is not so.
It is merely so.
It is not, merely so.
It is not, merely, so.
The tourist experience is somewhere between the abstract and the concrete. What is bad about the tourist is not the tourist as such but rather the behaviours or expectations designated by the terminology of “a tourist”.
Touring is for leisure, only. Touring for no purpose but to engage one’s own seduction.
The Protestant on holiday. The Calvinist? The Methodist? The Weberian?
The Travel Photographer.
Travel, as opposed to tourist. “I am a traveller.”
What are you, first? Why are you here? What can you hear, here?
I am choosing to be in Rome, I think, so that I be somewhere that I CAN effectively work and think because I certainly cannot do so at “home”.
ROMEHOME.
As Paris was homelier than home?
It becomes clearer, perhaps, that an artist really cannot work within an institution. An Academy. Of any sort. Academic artists are decorators.
The academy/school/house style is indescribably close to being perfectly the opposite of what a generous act in the photographic might be.