Here I’ve done a Q&A with myself about my MSc dissertation into responsible photography in travel media. (It helps having a split personality sometimes…)
What are you studying?
It’s an MSc in Environment and Sustainability at Birkbeck College, University of London and I’m writing a dissertation about responsible image use in UK travel publishing.
Why’s that then?
In the era of the reappraisal of how we depict our world, I’m devising a study that looks into how nature, environment, landscapes and climate issues are depicted in travel media; whether or not images chosen reflect the story they’re published with and, indeed, whether or not the story references and articulates the environmental situation in the country. I’ve chosen Madagascar for my case study.
Why did you pick Madagascar?
Initially it was suggested by the marvellous and ever-inspiring Meera Dattani. She had recently retuned from the island and published this well-researched and informative article for Adventure.com. It’s a bucket-list destination with plenty of pristine nature, and very photogenic at that. But there are many environmental and developmental issues at stake too: oil extraction, deforestation, mining, food insecurity, rapid population growth, political instability, poverty and climate vulnerability among others, that all coalesce to put huge pressures on the natural environment.
Have you actually been to Madagascar?
No, but if any commissioning editors or art directors reading this want to send me on a research trip (when we can travel again), just say and I’m there. I purposely picked somewhere I hadn’t been so that I only had pre-conceived ideas based on what I’ve seen. This may prove to be a useful standpoint or a very unhelpful one, we’ll see…
How can travel writers help you?
Have you been to Madagascar? And written about it for the British Press? Yes? Excellent, please can you send me all your articles, I would like to read them and use them as part of my study.
How are you going to use these articles about Madagascar in your study?
I’ve been devising a way of coding the text and images in order to create a dataset that I can analyse. The idea is that I will then be able to develop a broad picture of how British travel media portrays the environmental situation in Madagascar. From this, I can draw conclusions and use it to inform the creation a set of guidelines for responsible image use in travel publishing.
Tell me more about academic study into travel journalism and travel imagery…
Travel writing in the press has often been widely regarded by academia as ‘fluff pieces’ rather than ‘proper’ journalism. But some scholars have deemed it worthy of academic scrutiny.
The first to do so were Fürsich and Kavoori in 2001 and in their seminal study into travel writing, identified five main reasons travel journalism needed to be studied more deeply:
”a) the boom of the tourism industry
b) tourism and its impact remains understudied
c) leisure is a significant social practice
d) travel journalism is an important site for international communication research
e) travel journalism has special contingencies as it is a highly charged discourse strongly affected by public relations.”
It’s this last one that led Lyn McGaur to investigate the connection between place-branding in Tasmania and the rather more destructive old-wood logging also taking place on the island. She showed that most travel journalists didn’t mention the contentious forest destruction in their pieces and, instead, focused on the pristine nature and consumable potential for adventure available on the island. It was her contention that travel writing functions as a form of elite-place branding because of its “conspicuous proximity to tourism advertising”. Essentially, what she’s saying is that the messaging in public relations comes from a deeper government agenda intent on diverting attention away from the environmental conflict arising from the industrial destruction of ancient forest.
Another study into the connection between tourism and politics comes from Rosaleen Duffy in A Trip Too Far in which she investigates ecotourism in Belize. She points out that in tourism, cultures and societies become commodities to be consumed by an external audience. And goes on to say that “Ecotourism, in particular, is dependent on representations that present the environment as something that is available to to be discovered and enjoyed by the tourist. This encompasses notions of the exotic, the unspoilt and the ‘other’. The imagery involved in ecotourism is intended to appeal to environmentally conscious individuals who are interested in learning more about the destination.” ....” Their holidays can become quests for sights and experiences to be photographed.”
There’s a long history of academic investigation into travel images and the role it plays in tourism marketing. It was conceptualised by John Urry in his seminal book The Tourist Gaze, first written in 2000 and in it he says “The concept of the gaze highlights that looking is a learned ability and that the pure and innocent eye is a myth.” and “Just like language, one’s eyes are socio-culturally framed and there are various ‘ways of seeing’.” He goes on to investigate how through embellishment, erasing, exaggeration, stereotyping and repetition commercial photography produces the kind of imaginative geography that become ‘place myths’.
This has been picked up by several academics and since the advent of image sharing sites like Flickr and Instagram, it’s been much easier to track what tourists photograph and share from their holidays. One study identified three main tropes that holiday photos on instagram tended to portray:
–The tropical exotic: emptiness, exoticism and idyllic otherness
–The promontory witness: mastery of the landscape “This is MY landscape” eg. conquering the mountain and using at the top of viewpoint, etc.
–Fantasised assimilation: appropriative performances eg. trying local customs
All three of these tropes remove local people as well as a layer of reality from the perceptible view of the country and culture being depicted.
Another study concluded that tourists do indeed close what is known in academia as the ‘hermeneutic circle’ – tourists take pictures of the kinds of images they see in brochures, guidebooks and other forms of marketing; the myths are perpetuated and the circle of representation is completed.
Why is this important?
Now, here’s where my thinking comes in. Having worked variously in travel publishing for the last 17 years (eek, yes) as a designer/art director, photographer and writer, I’ve noticed that increasingly the images used are from stock agencies like Alamy, Getty and Shutterstock rather than commissioned specifically for the story, like they might have been 15-20 years ago. Image licensing and purchasing is a competitive business – there’s money to be made by the platforms who take a commission – but there’s less and less available for the photographer. Curiously, there are even FREE image sites like Pixabay and Unsplash which get used by online travel publications who have no budget to illustrate their travel stories.
Where travel publications can afford to send photographers on assignments along with the writers it means there’s a connection between the images and the text in the finished piece. It means that a casual flicker-through who doesn’t have time to read the whole article (and let’s face it, in the age of shorter attention spans, we’re all guilty of that), will get a sense of what the story is about. But those who have to rely on image library shots can only articulate their story with more generic visual renderings of it. Pictures are pretty and used to lift the page rather than to communicate the story in visual form. Images from these libraries vary in quality vastly and they’re supplied by everyone from seasoned professionals and semi-pros to amateurs and holiday-snappers trying to make an extra dollar or two. (That’s not to say that amateurs and holiday-snappers aren’t going to create decent, publishing-worthy images but it’s important to point out that there’s a lot more to photography than having a decent camera and creating sharp, technically proficient images. Those who have immersed themselves in photography for any length of time understand that, beyond lighting, time of day and composition, there are contextual decisions to be made about what to put in the frame and what to leave out, when to leave the camera in its bag and not reveal certain places and situations to the wider world. There’s a responsibility associated with the way to depict and envision the world.)
So, you can perhaps see where I’m headed with this: the vast plethora of image libraries are supplied by all sorts photographers who may or may not just be perpetuating the replication of the same image tropes they’ve seen elsewhere and since time immemorial. I want to find out to what an extent this is happening. To what extent do images of Madagascar articulate the reality of the environmental situation in the country and to what extent is it reduced to narrow visual tropes? Indeed, how relevant is it to the piece if the writing is only functioning as a conduit for the pr message to flow through?
The study comes from point of valuing the importance of visual storytelling and assessing its place alongside the texts of travel writers. I shall if course report back with my findings. Thanks for taking time to read my manifesto, as it were, please let me know if you can help in any way or want to get involved in the wider debate.