#9 Tourist Photographs
or: how I learned to accept I'm an impressionist painter
I skipped last month because I was on a lengthy trip through Norway & Denmark while May turned into June. The essay that follows will be part of a book I’m working on involving photos from that trip, also featured in this post. It’s about my relationship to photography in my practice, specifically images taken while traveling. This month’s playlist is a companion piece to all of this. It’s heavy on atmospheric indie rock and electronic music.
Tomberlin and Tess Roby were my calming companions for countless hours in the air across 10 different flights. Songs like those by Renata Zeigur, Frontperson, Hovvdy came out shortly before or while we were in Europe and I spent a lot of time listening to them while moving through. Others are contextual, such as Laura Marling, Hjálmar, and Holly Humberstone playing in bars we hung out in, or Sting’s Field of Gold playing on repeat in the bathroom of a very long and luxurious dinner. While I’m usually stubborn about trends, Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill is just too good and fits the overall mood, captures this moment in time, and there was a literal mountain outside our house in Lofoton that our friends ran up at night. Artists like The Books, Four Tet, and Peals use of found sounds and samples forms a conceptual link to how I’m thinking about image making. I can’t give a good explanation for bands like Seahaven, The Velvet Teen, or Volcano I’m Still Excited besides they round out the mood in an inexplicable way.
For the next playlist, I’ll be driving to Wisconsin and back for a residency and want to create an American Road Trip playlist, and would love your help. Is there a song that encapsulates road trips for you? Please tell me about it!
I create these playlists and essays as an extension of my art & publishing practice and will always make them free, but if you feel like monetarily supporting with the added benefit of getting weird stuff in the mail every month, I do have a patreon if you are interested.
And now, to the music…
#9 Tourist Photographs
Listen here on Spotify or here on Youtube Music
Renata Zeigur - Evergreen
Frontperson - Reach Out
William Shatner - Together
Hjálmar - Lof
Sting - Fields of Gold
Tomberlin - sunstruck
Tess Roby - Ideas of Space
Kate Bush - Running Up That Hill
Everything Everything - Pizza Boy
The Districts - Velour and Velcro
Hovvdy - Town
Four Tet - Angel Echoes
The Books - Be Good To Them Always
Volcano, I’m Still Excited!!! - Mostly On An Island
The Velvet Teen - Four Story Tantrum
Chorusing - Watching The Beams
Anna of the North - Oslo
Holly Humberstone - Please Don’t Leave Just Yet
Seahaven - Silhouette
Daughter - Tomorrow
Ben Howard - Finders Keepers
Laura Marling - For You
Throw Me The Statue - Honeybee
Caroline Spence - I Know You Know Me
Cristin Milioti - 715 Creeks
Big Red Machine - Forest Green
Peals - Essential Attitudes
Valley of the Giants - Whaling Tale
“You’re taking tourist photographs”.
She said it in a matter-of-fact way that wasn’t exactly authoritative but definitely conveyed a feeling that her words were obvious truth rather than mere personal opinion. I don’t believe it was qualitative; this specific grad school mentor had a way of speaking in declarative statements that were delivered with a tonally implied but rarely spoken conclusionary “right?”. I’m sure this served mostly as a perfunctory statement to get the studio visit moving. It however has obviously stuck with me.
To say I disagree with the statement isn’t exactly accurate; it's true, I do primarily take the photos I work with while traveling. In undergrad I had a classmate critique photos I had taken in The Netherlands by asking, “These are beautiful photos, but why did you have to travel to Europe to take them? Why can’t you just take photos of Chicago?”. Ironically, I already did have hundreds of photos of Chicago I cherished, they just all had been taken before I lived there.
Yet, agreeing with the suggestion I was taking snapshots similar to any other American Tourist felt a bridge too far. The photos in question included over 300 photos taken across Germany, Poland, and Uganda the previous summer. Chronologically, they began somewhat identifiable — attempts to capture the imposing scale of the Cologne Cathedral was a particularly significant undertaking — but quickly merged into abstracted images that were much more ethereal (or, blurry). This was largely a product of two factors: 1. I had spent most of three months alone outside of the occasional interaction with new acquaintances, which allowed my eyes and mind to wander with a meditative freedom, and 2. I had unknowingly flipped a setting switch on the bottom of my camera which I did not notice until I had developed the first round of film a month into my trip.
I should pause here to explain how I take the photos I use for art purposes. While I own several high quality film and digital cameras, I shoot almost exclusively using Holga cameras. Holgas are plastic film cameras similar to your standard point-and-shoot disposable cameras, but they are reusable and somehow even lower quality. They are extremely light and can fit in a jacket pocket easily, which is why I began using them while traveling. If you have ever seen or used one, it was likely the medium format model that, while still in production, gave one the ability to shoot 120mm film while investing just $19.99. They have a lens that needs to be focused, but the viewfinder, like your point-and-shoot, is not connected to the lens, so you're left to guess based on a set of minimal illustrations. It has a manual frame advance, causing the user to arbitrarily choose the frame placement, allowing for the possibility of multiple exposures. The most pertinent feature for our current purposes are the two film speed settings: 1. The “Normal” (N) setting which shoots at a standard 1/100th of a second, and 2. The “Bulb” (B) setting, which keeps the shutter open for the duration the user is physically pressing the action knob/button.
Standard human shake will cause images to be blurry with speeds under 1/60th of a second. Dear reader, I must inform you, I am unable to click the camera option in anywhere near 1/60th of a second. I found this out while excitedly opening the envelopes holding prints from roughly a dozen rolls of film I had processed in the first city I stayed long enough to endure the developing turn around time. I could not tell you if I genuinely preferred these accidental blurrier photos, or if deep shame based adrenaline threw me into a sort of aesthetic Stockholm Syndrome, but I decided to keep this switched flipped for the remainder of my trip.
While not dissimilar from the images I’ve been taking since, the 30+ rolls of film I began to unpack once I returned home were really the first photos I had presented as serious parts of my practice. They would eventually become the focus of my thesis works Gorale and Tea Time, but I’m not sure I even viewed them as photos at the time, rather something more akin to a conceptual archive of sorts. I did NOT see them as “tourist photos”. They barely looked like anything — light shining through moving bushes, an out of focus hillside, a shadow on the ground. If anything, they were esoteric souvenirs, visualizations of a memory.
I rarely refer to myself as a photographer, which I admit is a slightly cheeky stance since the majority of my work starts as exposures on film. While I’m using the tools of photography to make my images, I’m not terribly concerned with photography, especially not with taking “good” photographs. I feel comfortable saying this because my initial spark and training within the visual arts was analog photography and I tend to believe the communal nature of dark rooms and the necessity to think in a highly detailed manner about technical choices framed out my foundation for printmaking. However, beyond the occasional social media share of scans, I typically only show images in their final risograph or screenprint form, which pulls them more into the conversation of printmaking than one photographers are concerned with.
This of course is not to say I’m not interested in taking beautiful or otherwise aesthetically pleasing photographs, quite the contrary. I’m currently deeply committed to an aesthetic I have come to accept resembles the widely adored impressionist paintings I grew up seeing on museum walls and souvenir mugs — this too a connotation I wildly rejected at first even though I was simultaneously making woodcuts of hay stacks. You’ve hopefully picked up on a trend by now.
My camera has become my sketchbook. While I always have a notebook in my pocket, I’ll often grab my camera first to capture the atmospheric location of a thought. Weeks to months later, I’ll attempt to decipher the overlapping images on small rolls of plastic, much like revisiting an old cryptic journal or a field recorder you forgot about. I can usually transport myself to the place and time, but often have to surrender to the mystery of what exactly I thought was so interesting at that moment. When I’m lucky, I still find it interesting, if not for entirely new and different reasons.
Choosing to purchase a box of expired film from an estate sale through Ebay as the only film for three weeks in Norway, a country I hope I return to many more times but in all likelihood may not, was a curious choice. Once film expires, it can lose exposure sensitivity and colors can start to react in unexpected ways. Sometimes this is negligible, blues may shift towards purples while white loses its brilliance. More expired film may cause your photos to become underexposed and dark. If the film is really old and stored improperly, light leaks can begin to creep in, causing bright white and yellow flares to appear in your images.
The majority of the film I brought to Norway included all of these features. We spent a week in mountainous islands above the Arctic Circle where the sun never set, but my physical documentation of this environment resembles how I imagine the last light of November would illuminate the landscape. Still, the images take me back to white beaches and wildflowers and the smell of dried fish in the air, but those guideposts will become unreliable quickly.
I was caught off guard by how comfortable I felt in Norway. It is of course one of the wealthiest nations in the world and everyone speaks perfect English while subsisting on a diet of at least 30% hot dogs. Deeper, there was something shared I could only feel but lack the words to describe. I think there is something about both nations being relatively young (within the context of predominantly white western countries) and thus our cultural identities contain malleability. This is of course the findings of a straight white 38 year old Californian male artist who spent three weeks in a foreign country reliant largely on the itinerary suggestions of local friends who share multiple identities and interests. I do not know this country deeply, I only know what I saw and felt while moving through it temporarily with a desire to know it more. Like a blossoming friendship or romance, I absorbed as much as I could and made conclusions that affirmed my feelings.
I want to think curiosity often benefits from temporary conclusions, like mental cairns that allow you to choose between feeling satisfied enough with your journey to head back out, or continuing down a trail that may reveal itself slowly over time as a loop that leaves you with a wholly different understanding of where you began. Planting a flag forces you to consider if you should defend it or if possibly it should be moved and reconsidered all together.
When I think of photos one takes on vacation, I jump to cliches; a smiling couple in front of the Eiffel Tower, a faintly lit silhouette viewing a sunset in the caldera of Santorini, a group in lederhosen at Oktoberfest. These are images for showing others, including your future self, that you have been there; you once knew this place. I however am disinterested in taking pictures of landmarks and over time have become increasingly uncomfortable taking photographs of people. Yet, I still feel a need to create a relativity container for the places I have been. I return home only to make hundreds of copies of publications as a proxy for my family vacation slideshow which has been edited down to show the highlights of the trip, or at least some idiosyncratic version. Even when I qualify how annoying it is when people tell you what to do on your vacation, I will tell you to go to Norway and that you must eat and drink at Tempo Tempo when you visit Bergen, because of a coincidental encounter I had that formed friendships. You will say that sounds great, that hopefully you’ll get to go one day, and for a moment, we’ll exist together within mutually exclusive yearnings for a temporary respite from the real lives we currently lead.
Maybe she was right.