travel writing

In which I start talking about travel writing and end up talking about how no one actually cares about what pictures are taken of.

I started reading Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle the other day, and was surprised by how little of Darwin there is in it. The Voyage is a memoir of five years of travel and research that he did aboard a ship (although he spent about 3 of those years on land), and in these memoirs he dives into biology, anthropology, history, and geology (and who-knows-what-else in what I haven't read yet). I'm interested in this on two fronts: first, how little there is of Darwin; second, how much this would fail if attempted today.

First: by reading the Voyage we would know very little about Darwin. He doesn't include anecdotes of his past or his own history, even though he is willing to talk about the lives of the people he meets. He subjects everything in his narrative to a level of observation that he never extends to himself. Darwin is in some ways the center of the text, everything is written by him and more or less about his experiences, but we learn about him not through anything he says about himself but by what he writes about everything else and the methods he employs to discover.

Here is where I swim a little into the deep end where I mostly have speculation without data.

Second: any travel writer today that attempted to make observations that are disciplinary in nature would not be taken seriously by academics or researchers. Biology, anthropology, geology, and history have solidified enough that there are acceptable methods and necessary bodies of knowledge to be able to enter into those discourses as someone who was something new and legitimate to say. So the plight of the travel writer is that someone else has studied much more in depth and systematically the things they are experiencing and observing, so that for a travel writer to make claims about social structures and customs doesnt have much weight. What's left then? The self and the experience that the self has. Without the ability to talk about what is outside, all that's left is the inside.

I'm also interested in this in correlation with photography and the development of the camera as a popular, affordable product. Most people (that I know) aren't good at writing about their traveling, and dont do it very much. Instead, they take a lot of pictures. But what is the point and what is the subject of these pictures?

One option is to use them as social commentary, but I think that just falls into sentimentality and essentialization. For instance, I show you all a picture of a Latvian man sitting on the sidewalk from my recent travels to Latvia, captioned with this: "Unemployment and poverty are sky-rocketing in Latvia." This sort of social commentary with photography is, I think, pretty useless unless it's backed up by actual research or by interacting with the subject of the photo, because what do I really know about that man, who am I to make him stand in for Latvian poverty?

So what is the point of photography? The dismal side of it is that most pictures are not unique. By that, I mean that anyone could reproduce the same picture by standing where I stood and pointing their camera at the angle I pointed. There is some level of personality in what is selected and edited, but it could still be reproduced easily. Not to mention (like someone was saying to Brent, Nate, and I the other day)...I don't know what I'm seeing. I can take a picture of hundreds of interesting buildings and alleyways and streets, but I don't know anything about them, so my selection might be informed aesthetically, but ultimately uninformed socially, culturally, politically. And the aesthetic is what most people compliment about other peoples pictures, the texture, definition, color, angle, balancing, etc. But noone would care about these pictures of the same objects if they were low resolution, pixellated, unbalanced, blown out. That is why I think that few people actually care about the subject/object of their own photography or other peoples photography.

In this sense, I think photography mostly points to the self, the one who took the picture, rather than the subject/object of the photo. Photo albums have very little to do with what is in the photos (stonehenge? who cares? there's a million better pictures out there). The function of photo albums and photography is to point to the experiences of the self: I went to Stonehenge, or Riga, and took this photo and edited it, even if I know nothing about what I'm photographing, and if the object doesn't matter to those who are viewing it. After all? Wouldn't people have the same level of appreciation of my pictures of Latvia if I claimed they were pictures of Lithuania, Estonia, Czech republic? Very few people would know enough to say that I was wrong, and no one would care in their aesthetic appreciation of it.

Perhaps this is the reason that I take absurd photographs and don't really care to put up photo albums, or to take pictures very often. The only pictures that are really interesting to me are pictures of human interactions and processes, pictures that couldn't be reproduced because no one could go back to the time/even/location of where it happened. Too bad my camera can't replicate those moments very well. And, I suppose it's really a false distinction to make between pictures of processes and pictures of still life: there is no still life, everything is a part of ongoing social, chemical, biological, economical processes, and is always changing. The idea of still life has to be scrapped!

But it's not all glass-half-empty, who says any of this is a bad thing? I suppose my instinct is to be angry about it, but I don't know that I have good reason to be.