> > Yes, I completely agree. I live in the most popular tourist place in > > Britain and my photographs of the place are very different from the > > tourists' photos. This is to be expected. An analogy: when I went to > > the Kruger NP in South Africa I got very excited seeing lions and > > giraffes and water buffalo, whereas to my hosts they were rather > > humdrum - what excited them were things like dung beetles. The > > resident and the tourist perspective are entirely different. > > absolutely. except that the dominant image of London in the popular > consciousness, the world at large or whatever is much more > representative of the 'real' London. and the dominant image of places > like Fez tends to be that of the tourists. which view of a place gets > privileged as the 'real' one (the native's or the tourist's) takes us, > i guess, to other imbalances... :-) >
the tourists' view and the residents' view are both equally real. Kruger NP really does contain lions, giraffes and water buffalo as well as dung beetles. When people talk about 'the real Erewhon' they seem to mean the Erewhon where people live. I don't see how an outsider can say that the dominant image is representative of the real London, or how an insider can really understand what the dominant image is. I certainly couldn't tell you. Whatever the dominant image of London is, the things I see tourists photographing are: each other leaning out of red phone booths pretending to make a call; policemen with tit-shaped helmets; Big Ben; red double-decker buses; black cabs; excessively-pierced alternative types at Camden Lock; Beefeaters; Chelsea pensioners; and so on. What a good travel photographer is supposed to do is show us something different that opens the eyes of the tourists as well as the residents. Perhaps a good travel photographer takes us behind those images - goes out with an Indian cabby for a few nights to see what his life is like; tries to get to see the internal workings of Big Ben; spends a few days with the guy with all the piercings. This is obviously not easy. I remember an issue of National Geographic 3 or 4 years ago which showed London photographed by Jodi Cobb (?) and apart from one or 2 excellent photographs it was deeply disappointing because it just seemed to fall into well-worn ruts throughout. It told me almost nothing about London. If National Geographic photographers can't do it, what hope is there for the rest of us? Bob -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
