Baji Manifesto
Travel photography is unanimously risky business. It's always outsider art, always made by uninformed observers. For a photograph to become a travel photograph, it must be a composed glimpse of something that the artist does not yet understand. It's naive because it has to be; it's distanced because the photographer has no way to come closer -- this isn't her land, these people are not her people. Because of this distance, the travel photograph often finds itself crossing the borders of the normal morality of art. Its gaze is frequently colonizing if not racist, imputing qualities onto the misunderstood others that they would never describe for themselves. Within the picture frame we see even less of the object in front of the lens; instead, most of the unconscious attitudes of the subject behind the camera are on evident display. A travel photographer cannot avoid being caught in her own exposures.
So then the heaps of banal tourist photographs. So then the stereotype that any goofy looking foreigner behind a digital camera isn't worth glancing at twice. The reason that the endless travel slideshows of neighbors and relatives bore us to screaming fits (afterwards, of course) is that we expect the images that play on the screen to hold some kind of truer content than what we've seen in our mind's eye before. I've thought about Buckingham Palace before, sure, but show me what the Palace is, give me some new way to understand it with meaning. Show me why I should care about the Sphinx as much as you do. Because I've never understood Machu Picchu, but you've been there, therefore you know, and this picture that you took is not getting it across, I don't get it, you fail to inform. You have not satisfied me.
We need to change our expectations. The travel photograph, perhaps, holds the most intrinsic subjectivity. The hands that carry every camera are linked to a critical eye, an eye with opinion, with slant. Most of the time the opinions that shape the picture can, at the very least, be well informed opinions. If you take a picture of something you know and love, or something that you understand and hate, your opinion is based on experience. Travel photography has three cornerstones: the naïve, the awestruck, and the ever-shifting subjective gaze; very little experience ever appears on the scene. Travel photographs are usually shots in the dark. So while I sit in the dark, shot through with sallow projector-light, listening to my cousin Jeff ramble on about Maori lodges, I am watching his photographs for traces of him, not the Maori. He tells me very little about them directly, but he indirectly explains himself.
Literary characters have long been based on a system of foils. I best expose myself through the presence of others. And through my treatment, uneasy, tentative, of the truly Other, I reveal my entire hand. The world as seen through the twin lenses (eye and camera) of a travel photographer is the world as seen by a fool's vision. I don't know enough about the object of the photograph to cover my tracks. Something strange catches the eye and the hand unzips the camera bag and winds the films and shoots, maybe shoots twice. The travel picture is taken out of a fundamental misunderstanding. Out of a: "Hey, that's cool." Or a: "That's really strange." Or a: "How beautiful! . . ." The picture is taken so that it can be looked at later, studied again with a kind of thoroughness and effort that a memory could never stand up to. (Memories being fragile things compared to silver halide and ammonium thiosulfate, and likely to deform a little under the hot mental light of remembrance). When we first take the photograph it appears a puzzle to us (at least the good ones do). So we watch it until we figure it out, we stare it down until it tells us its secrets. Why did it catch our attention? How does it give us that odd emotional warmth? Why do we care about it so much? A photo can only be put down with any sort of satisfaction after it has been solved. But with travel photos, for every foreign part that we figure out, we are solving two parts of ourselves.
So far, the people who have taken the photographs for this website are young, eighteen or nineteen. I'll only speak for myself. I feel shitty and irresponsible when I try to take a photograph of someone I don't know, understanding that I'll look at it later, understanding that in my portrayal of her I capture something untrue that she would hate if she saw in herself, and that I will never know what that false, hateful part is. I don't want to lie. I avoid taking pictures of strangers except at great distances. Most of the images on this site are of things whose emotions cannot be disrespected. (Whether their identity can be disrespected is another story). Perhaps one day I will be comfortable representing strangers falsely. Perhaps one day I will know everyone, and no one will be improperly exposed. But for now, my unquiet bleeds through these shots.
Travel photographs are risky, powerful things, and this website is full of them and packed with their flaws. But for all of their dangers, the other things that travel photographs always are is well intentioned. They may say that that's what the road to hell is paved with, but these images always intend to foster understanding. They will never show you the object so that you can know it, but they will always push you that way, and in their colors you will see the young glimmer of new meaning. It's mostly our new meaning.
--Jeremy
March, 2005