Influential and Technical: June 2009

Tourism, the Sublime and authentic reproducibility.
[a]

By Jesse Simons

Stage 4.Theory. Otago Polytechnic School of Fine Art 15.06.09

Since the beginning of humanity we have been on the move. Over time there have been needs to move for all kinds of reasons and in the present day more people than ever roaming the world. European voyages in the 18th and 19th century were setting out to discover, explore, and take hold of countries that were relatively untouched. New Zealand was one of these countries. In 1839 ‘The New Zealand Company’ was formed. This was a company which promoted emigrating from England to New Zealand. The images they used to promote New Zealand were some of the first depictions of New Zealand that were seen in Europe. Today New Zealand has a substantial tourism industry and is widely promoted visually on the Internet, in magazines and in tourist guides. New Zealand has a reputation for being a pure place with beautiful scenery. The image of New Zealand is familiar to people all around the World. In recent times we have seen immense technological innovations making travel easy, care-free, cheap and comfortable. We can now experience parts of the world that were once not even thought of. Because of these advances in technology and things like transportation there has been a shift in how we experience, see and perceive the world. Theorist Daniel Boorstin talks about the packaging of tourism and argues that the tourism boom since the Second World War has taken away the excitement of “travel” which is authentic, and replaced it with in-authentic tourism. Talking about the authenticity in tourism also relates to various types of tourism photography and the way images are captured. Relationships can also be made of Walter Benjamin’s theories about the authenticity of reproducible images. Another theory which has seen a big shift due to tourism in New Zealand is the notion of The Sublime and what the once heroic explorers experienced has been turned into commodity and is now being consumed in large quantities. Places can now be experienced online, trips can be quickly arranged and images can be captured instantly. ‘Almost all facets of life are accelerating. This is particularly evident in the tourism industry, where consumers want maximum pleasure in minimum time.’[1] Digital photography and the Internet have both considerably changed tourism and now almost everyone can find out about places, arrange trips and experience on line and in real life. There is now such a need to capture images of personal experiences in different places around the world. That demand has been met by digital photography and the Internet which makes distribution and sharing of images so quick and easy.

New Zealand being a young country as it is, is known to throughout the World as a beautiful scenic place to visit, and has been a popular tourist destination for a considerable amount of time. There are many places within the country that offer a unique, easily accessible part of our land to look at and experience. In the 19th century the Europeans voyaged across treacherous seas for months to find this relatively untouched land, explore it, and settle here. They drew pictures and took photos of the land, the animals and the people which inhibited it, and would return to their countries to show their people this exciting new place maybe even promote it publicly to get people to immigrate or make money off the vast amounts of natural resources. The race was on to be the first country to colonise New Zealand.Edward Gibbon Wakefield from London was the founder of The New Zealand Company, which was started in 1839. The aim of this company was to get people to emigrate from England to New Zealand, to start a new life and establish a new country. Wakefield envisaged the creating of “little Englands’ all over the World – each having the refinements and the social and economic structure of the Mother Country, but being free from its evils. The New Zealand Company was intended to turn this vision into reality in one particular country – New Zealand[2] Around this period was the first time images and depictions of New Zealand were being seen in other parts of the World. People were getting their first impressions of Aotearoa. Artists were commissioned to do paintings, drawings and take photos of scenes for the use of advertising and promoting. A lot of the first depictions that English citizens would have seen of New Zealand would have been propaganda images from The New Zealand Company promoting the good things and reasons to emigrate. They depicted scenes of New Zealand’s landscapes and also the lifestyle and business opportunities. [b]

An example of this is a work by Charles Heaphy ‘Thorndon flat and part of the City of Wellington, 1841’Heaphy's water colour emphasises the settled and orderly nature of the new town. The painting was sent to London to be reproduced as a lithograph, and used by the New Zealand Company in its publicity campaign to promote Wellington and encourage emigration.[3] Heaphy and other Artists did many works of this nature and New Zealand’s image internationally was established.

Today New Zealand’s image is widely promoted in many different ways. Tourism in New Zealand is one of the most money making industries and it is easy for an international tourist to find out what ever they want to know about this country. For example youcould type ‘explore New Zealand’ into your web browser and experience New Zealand online, through the portal of a computer screen. The Website http://www.newzealand.com/ would be the present day version of ‘The New Zealand Company’. It is promoting businesses to work with New Zealand, people to move here to live or to study and it is predominantly promoting tourism. This website contains all the key elements that Countries use to promote themselves to tourists. You can look at hundreds of photos, watch videos, and learn about the all of the good places to go all in a night sat down in front of your computer. You could also experience New Zealand online by going into Google Earth and seeing the whole country from above, or even by walking through the streets of towns and cities. Alternatively if you wanted to actually experience New Zealand you could type in ‘new zealand package deal’ and book a real life adventure. You could be in New Zealand within days of booking and then you could be taken to these amazing places that you have seen online, in books and on Lord of the Rings. But how authentic would this so called ‘real adventure’ be? Would you have time to fully take in the places in which you visit or would it be moderated by the tight trip schedule and the fact that everything has been done and decided for you? Theorist Daniel Boorstin exclaims; ‘Travel adventure today thus inevitably acquires a factitious, make-believe, unreal quality. And only the dull travel experience seems genuine. Both for the few adventuring travelers who stillexist and for the larger numbers of travelers-turned-tourists, voyaging becomes a pseudo-event.’ Boorstin talks about the packaging of tourism and argues that the tourism boom since the Second World War has taken away the excitement of “travel” which is authentic, and replaced it with in-authentic tourism. The cause of this is the rise of consumer culture, technological innovation and that utopian ideal of wanting to go somewhere exotic in your leisure time. It is to do with the advances that made travel cheap, safe, and available to the masses; the market which promotes the quest for new experiences.

Back before the invention of airplanes, travelers who voyaged from Europe to New Zealand would have needed to put in a considerable amount of time, planning and effort to do so, and they would have been very motivated. The months spent on boats involved big risks and dangerous factors like storms and disease would make it an adventure that would have been much more enduring, not for the faint-hearted, and a more authentic experience. They would have been more exposed to the elements, more in touch with nature, and more engaging with it. Traveling to New Zealand by boat would have been particularly challenging because of the isolation of this land in the middle of the South Pacific. But that would have made the thought of it that much more exciting, to travel to a far away land in the middle of the Ocean.

Today that excitement exists but in a different way. For an exciting adventure one could travel to New Zealand on a Luxury Cruise liner with two swimming pools, a gym, three bars and five restaurants. It would have been booked from a travel agency or online and everything would be organized and done for them, trouble-free and risk free. This changes the experience considerably and reiterates the shift in the idea of ‘the traveler’ to ‘the tourist’ “Now, when one risks so little and experiences so little on the voyage, the experience of having been there somehow becomes emptier and more trivial. When getting there was more troublesome, being there was more vivid. When getting there is ‘fun’ arriving there somehow seems not to be arriving at any place”[4]

New Zealand is renowned internationally for its scenic beauty and this image draws thousands of visitors every year. The New Zealand tourism industry is built on this all-natural image. The main slogan on http://www.newzealand.com/ is ‘100% Pure New Zealand’ This modern way we travel and the want to explore and experience nature can be related to the 18th Century notion of the ‘sublime’. The sublime is an abstract quality in which the dominant feature is the presence or idea of transcendental immensity or greatness; power, heroism or vastness in space or time. The sublime inspires awe and reverence, or possibly fear. It refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation.
[c]

17th and 18th century writers used ‘The Sublime’ to describe aspects of nature like the mountains of the Swiss Alps when they were doing the ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe. ‘The first explorers and then the colonialists encountered vast new landscape, on a larger scale than ever before. The notion of the ‘sublime’ now that they had carried with them now had enough space to expand horizontally.’[5] Captain James Cook experienced the Sublime when he voyaged around the World and discovered new places. Now the sublime can be experienced by a large portion of the population but there is a new way to experience this notion and it is now greatly accelerated and is experienced in a different way. The landscape is being consumed; cultures have become global consumer items. The Sublime is now seen quickly, in large groups, and captured easily. These factors detract from the notions of the awe and heroism that The Sublime is all about. ‘Ecotourism and adventure tourism in New Zealand are practices that (re)activate the sublime’ The participants, descendants of grand tourists viewing the ‘sublime’ landscape no longer meander, but accelerate through an increasingly compressed and hyperinscribed space. [6] The passive viewing of nature has evolved to kinetic experiences within this sped-up aspect. Technological advances like digital photography and video cameras inspire and promote these new forms of visitor consumption of this kinesthetically enhanced landscape.

A lot has changed in the way of travel and accessibility.Because of things like passenger airplanes, cruise liners and new communication technologies like the Internet, the World has become ‘smaller’ and the ease of seeing different places and enriching ones perception of the World can be accessed by the masses. Because of the way we travel the traveler is more than ever isolated from the landscape in which he seeks to experience. Air travel has insulated the experience. Flying from one continent to another takes only a matter of hours and is experienced from a portal thousands of feet above the land and even the clouds. You get little or no experience of the land in which you are passing. “Nothing to see but the weather; since we had no weather, nothing to see at all. I had flown not through space but through time…the airplane robbed me of the landscape. The tourist gets there without the experience of having gone.“[7]

The speed in which we experience things has changed considerably. A Japanese tourist’s experience of New Zealand could be arriving in Queenstown in the morning, getting on a bus that will take them to Milford, doing a four hour boat trip, getting back on the bus and heading back to Queenstown airport. Besides the fact that its not enough time to take in the aura a place, they will probably be so tired that they will sleep through most of the journey. Its not only tourism where this new speedy experience exists. In Cinema the early films in the 19th century were a lot longer and a lot less eventful. To actually be at the Cinema would have been part of the experience. Today you see Hollywood films that are action packed, from beginning to end, and if they are not, people won’t watch them. This is all part of today’s consumerist society and our need to consume and take in as much as we possibly can.

Another thing to note about the speed in which we do things is the accelerating access to the landscape. There are more ways to get places quickly, and the market is flooded with companies that make the experience faster, more efficient, and trouble free. People are wanting to see more, to experience different places. Everything is sped up, from getting to the destination, to capturing an image of it. Almost all facets of life are accelerating and this is particularly evident in the tourism industry, where consumers want maximum pleasure in minimum time.[8] ‘Tourism heralds postmodernism; it is a product of the rise of consumer culture, leisure and technological innovation.’[9] Also technologies like digital photography have enabled people to quickly and easily capture a representation of a place, which can be later reflected on. Think of early photographers who would have spent hours setting up a their gear and getting the shot. Before that, the painters would have taken even longer, thus soaking up the aura of the place and experiencing more of the energy that a place creates. Digital technology has dramatically sped up the way images are gathered.

The way people can capture images of foreign places has also taken a considerable swing due to new technologies. Digital photography has made taking large quantities of quality photos really easy for anyone to do. However the uniqueness of the photography being done in tourist areas is not something to question. Tourists are directed to the point that they should take a photo from. Walk along the path until you reach the viewing platform and then take a photo. As Julian Stallabrass commented on the nature of tourist photography:“Photographers are urged to get closer to their subjects, to use backgrounds that do not distract from the main point of interest, to use portrait-format images for portraits, and to place objects in the foreground of landscapes. In all this, there is a very curious tension between creativity and rule-making”[10] This takes away certain authenticity of the experience and the photo. Sure they are possibly taking these photos to show their friends and family back at home but it enhances the idea of the consumer driven industry of mass appeal. It has also taken the uniqueness from photography. This photo has been taken thousands of times, from the same point, of the same place. You are being told where to go and what to take a photo of. I recently visited Milford Sound where I stood on a platform and took a photo of Mitre Peak.

[d] For some reason I had an urge to take a picture. I had seen so many pictures of this peak and I wanted one of my own, It must have been subconsciously driven from the hundreds of images I already had of Mitre Peak in my mind that I simply had to do it. It’s not a particularly good photo, the light wasn’t amazing, maybe I took it so that I could prove to my friends that I had been there. When I returned home I typed ‘Mitre peak’ into Google images and approximately 46,500 results were found.
[e]

This I thought was astounding and shows the in-authenticity of the experience of today’s ‘travelers’ and of tourist photography. These iconic places are already in our mind, we know what they look like, but we still take the picture. They have been depicted in art works since the 19th century when new immigrants painted the sublime New Zealand landscapes. There are parallels between the reproducibility of the experience of the Tourist who walks out on to the platform and takes the snap-shot of Mitre Peak, and the person who sits at home on their computer and types in ‘Mitre Peak’ into Google. Both are experiencing something which has lost a sense of authenticity. As Walter Benjamin writes; ‘the work becomes authentic only after the first copy of it is produced. The reproductions are the aura, and ritual, far from being a point of origin, derives from the relationship between the original object and it’s socially constructed importance.’[11] He also goes on to say the reproducibility of art endangers the original’s aura. Mass existence detaches the authentic object from the sphere of tradition. What the invention of the Passenger Plane did in terms of accessing foreign places has been magnified significantly by what digital photography and the Internet have done.
Online travel is a new thing which is even less engaging and less authentic than that of the ‘tourist package deal’ travel experience. Less engaging in that the participant does not need to leave the comfort of his or her house, does not experience anything physical, has not moved at all, and probably hasn’t mentally engaged with the site of interest. By online travel I am talking about things like Google Earth and other sites where the computer screen is used as a portal to the world similar to the portal of an airplane, cruise ship or information centre. The portal of the computer screen can be interacted with however, like in Google maps you can virtually travel down a street in a country on the other side of the World. Or venture down the road without leaving your bedroom.
[f]

In some ways you have more control in your online travel than you would on a cruise ship or airplane. You can find out about specific places, see photographs, watch videos, and find out all you need to know about a foreign place so that you do not have to even go there to experience it. Of course the experience will be significantly different comparing the online experience to the real, but the ‘real’ is not always as real as one would think. Can you really experience a place when everything has been done for you? And the journey is as easy as hopping on a plane, and upon arriving getting on a bus which will then take you to your Hotel.

Another question in the authenticity of the tourist’s experience as well as the ease of its accessibility is the question of what is already known about a place via the mass media advertising and the flooded imagery of certain sites.There is so much advertising on the Internet and there are so many travel agents that often the decision is partially made by the marketing involved. Sight seeing items which can be easily guaranteed to tourists on arrival to a Country have certain merchandisable qualities and must be easily accessible to create a comfortable experience for the tourist. In a visual way they also must be set up in a way that it is possible to easily capture the moments.Like the hula dances in Hawaii which are staged for photographer-tourists, the widely appealing tourist attractions are appropriate to those specially made for tourist consumption.[12] The item of attraction must be easily photographed, plenty of daylight, and inoffensive, suitable for family viewing. In New Zealand this would be relevant to our nature and cultural tourism. These events tend to become bland and unsurprising reproductions of what the image-flooded tourist knew was there all the time. Places like Milford sound are seen so often that one would not be surprised to see it in real life. The tourist’s appetite for strangeness thus seems best satisfied when the pictures in his own mind are verified in a far away land.

In photography there are many different motives for capturing images. When talking about photography in tourism a lot of it is about the capturing of images of personal experience. The experience one has when exploring a foreign land. There is also representative photography, taking a photo of something that is about that specific thing. An example would be a close up image of a bird to examine that particular bird. There are mass amounts of imagery in marketing which promote a certain place or tourism item. These images would be seductive and attractive, to lure people in. The promotional brochures often display landscapes without people. Where people are present in these representations they are likely to be tourists rather than locals, inviting the potential traveller to put them selves in the picture.

[g] ‘Pristine nature is glossily presented as having empty space into which to escape.’[13] Travel brochures often contain enthusiastic escapist tones, and offer a memorable experience in nature as a compensation for the daily grind of the commercial urban world. If we look at artistic depictions of New Zealand in the 19th century, a lot of the same kind of sites and aspects of Nature are still being shown. There are big mountain scenes, waterfalls, gorges, and reflections on lakes. We can see that these same highly celebrated places became icons of cultural and national identity. The tourist postcard worked to valorise these Landscapes. Commercial travel brochures then subsumed these images.
When looking at different aspects of image making (representational, personal, promotional) historically you can see links to what I talked about earlier in early depictions and perceptions of New Zealand. There were representative images like works by Sir Joseph Banks. Banks was a Botanist on board Captain James Cook’s Endeavour and he did representational drawings and studies of native New Zealand birds and plants, and people. [h]

Promotional images like Charles Heaphy’s paintings of scenes in towns to be used for promoting the New Zealand Company’s colonisation efforts. And images of personal experience include paintings and photos of encounters and various experiences that early settlers and travellers had in New Zealand. These aspects of image making are still happening in photography in New Zealand but on a lot larger scales and on different levels due to various factors. One major change has been the invention of digital photography and its availability to almost anyone. In the early days of World Travel the people who were capturing images of places would have been mostly artists. Who ever wasn’t an artist with particular skill wouldn’t be able to create the same quality of images of personal experience or representation. The mechanicalisation of image making in photography and now digital photography has made it easy for the traveller to capture images.

Differentiating photos of personal experience and representation in tourism in New Zealand today can be quite difficult as the boundaries are often blurred, but there some factors to state. ‘Nature’ today is seen as a value so when you see tourist’s images of a natural phenomenon i.e the Geysers in Rotorua they are capturing the value of that part of nature. So it is representing the subject, not so much talking about personal experience. However looking at a tourist blog on the Internet containing images of Geysers in Rotorua in that context would be also about personal experience. Depending on the context an image could be either. With the Internet and things like blogs and social networking sites like facebook there is a more public view of personal experience. People can upload their photographs from their holiday in another country and show hundreds and potentially thousands of people images from their experience. In this case it is about the personal experience as it may have been more about representation if it was not put in the public context. In tourism it is another way for other people to find out about different places and see personal experiences that people have had. Digital photography has made this all possible and so easy for anyone to do. Like the images they capture, our cameras speak of a culture based on standardization and mass appeal.

New Zealand and its sublime landscape were once seen by only a brave few. These few experienced what not many others had. They brought back visual depictions of this land, and promoted it. Now landscape and adventure tourism in New Zealand is a major industry and the image of this country is known throughout the world. There has been a major shift in recent years in how we experience and view the world. Travelling around the world today has been made a lot easier and fewer risks are involved. Developments in technology and mass marketing have influenced this change and now everyone wants to travel and enrich one’s perception of the world. Digital photography and devices like video cameras have dramatically enhanced the flow of images and media seen around the world via the Internet. Now it is easy to find out what you want about a place and experience it in some way or another. Mass tourism is not as unique as it used to be and it has lost a sense of authenticity. This is partly due to the reproducibility and repetitive nature of the industry driven by the post modern consumer society. Images can be instantly captured and infinitely reproduced and sent around the world. This makes the perception of the world seem smaller as information can be accessed more easily. What the invention of the Passenger Plane did in terms of accessing foreign places has been magnified significantly by what digital photography and the Internet have done.

References:
Borstin, Daniel J. The Image: A guide to pseudo-events in America. Harper & Row Publishers Incorporated New York. 1964
Borstin, Daniel J. From Traveller to Tourist – The Lost Art of Travel. Harper & Row Publishers Incorporated New York. 1964
Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel – Post modern discourses of displacement. Duke University Press, 1996.
Bell, Claudia and John Lyall. The accelerated Sublime. Landscape, Tourism and Identity. Published by Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002
Coleman, Simon and Mike Crang. Tourism: Between place and performance. Published by Berghahn Books, 2002
Thompson, Krista A. An Eye for the Tropics – Tourism, Photography and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque. Duke University Press, 2006.
Frow, John. Time & Commodity Culture – Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity. Clarendon Press, Oxford. 1997
Hunter, Don. Lines of Site. From Scope (art), 3, Nov 2008.
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Illuminations, trans, Harry Zohn. New York Schocken. 1965.
MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. London, Macmillan, 1976.
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. New York: P.F. Collier & Son Company, 1909-14

Highfield, Camilla and Peter Smith. Pushing the Boundaries – Eleven Contemporary Artists in Aotearoa New Zealand. Gilt Edge Publishing, 2004.

Main, William and John. B Turner. New Zealand Photography from 1840 to the Present. Nga Whakaahua O Aotearoa. Mai I 1840 Ki Nainei. Photo Forum Inc, 1993.

Eggleton, David. Into the Light. A History of New Zealand Photography. Craig Potton Publishing, 2006.

Brownson, Ron. John Kinder's New Zealand By John Kinder. Auckland Art Gallery, Peter Shaw.Published by Random House New Zealand Ltd, 2004

Te Papa Online. The New Zealand Company http://tpo.tepapa.govt.nz/ViewTopicExhibitDetail.asp?TopicFileID=0x000a4d34&Language=English&dumbyparam=search cited 01/06/09
http://www.newzealand.com/ cited 13/06/09

List of Images:
a) Simons, Jesse. The Navigator, Doubtful Sound. 2009
b) Heaphy, Charles. Thorndon Flat and part of the city of Wellington. [April, 1841] http://mp.natlib.govt.nz/detail/?id=4383&l=mi sited 12/06/09
c) Caspar, David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1817, Kunsthalle Hamburg. Romantic artists during the 19th century. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caspar_David_Friedrich_032_High_Resolution.jpg
d) Simons, Jesse. Mitre Peak. April 2009.
e) Screenshot from Google image search ‘Mitre Peak’ http://images.google.co.nz/images?hl=en&um=1&sa=1&q=mitre+peak&aq=f&oq= cited 02/05/09
f) Google Maps street view of the Octagon, Dunedin. http://maps.google.co.nz/maps?hl=en&um=1&q=mitre%20peak&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=il cited 13/06/09
g) Lake Matheson, South Island, New Zealand. http://www.newzealand.com/travel/sights-activities/scenic-highlights/lakes/lakes-home.cfm Photo Credit: Tourism New Zealand. Cited 13/06.09
h) Banks, Joseph. Knightia excelsa Rewa-rewa or New Zealand Honeysuckle New Zealand, 1968-71. From http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-Bea02Bank-t1-back-d11.html http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-Bea02Bank-t1-back-d11.html http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-Bea02Bank-t1-back-d11.html http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-Bea02Bank-t1-back-d11.htmlgo to page:http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-Bea02Bank-t1-back-d11.htmlhttp://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-Bea02Bank-t1-back-d11.html cited 13/06/09
[1] Bell, Claudia. The accelerated Sublime. Landscape, Tourism and Identity. Published by Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002

[2]http://tpo.tepapa.govt.nz/ViewTopicExhibitDetail.asp?TopicFileID=0x000a4d34&Language=English&dumbyparam=search cited 01/06/09.
[3] http://www.natlib.govt.nz/collections/online-exhibitions/pipitea-thorndon/charles-heaphy-thorndon cited 01/06/09
[4] Daniel J. Boorstin. From Traveler to Tourist – The Lost Art of Travel. Harper & Row Publishers Incorporated New York. 1964
[5] Claudia Bell. The accelerated Sublime. Landscape, Tourism and Identity. Published by Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002
[6] Claudia Bell. The accelerated Sublime. Landscape, Tourism and Identity. Published by Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002
[7] Daniel J. Boorstin. From Traveler to Tourist – The Lost Art of Travel. Harper & Row Publishers Incorporated New York. 1964
[8] Claudia Bell. The accelerated Sublime. Landscape, Tourism and Identity. Published by Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002
[9] Caren Kaplan. Questions of Travel – Post modern discourses of displacement. Duke University Press, 1996.

[10] Julian Stallabrass. “Sixty Billion Sunsets”. In Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture. London: Verso, 1996:20.
[11] Walter Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Illuminations, trans, Harry Zohn. New York Schocken. 1965.
[12] Daniel J. Boorstin. From Traveler to Tourist – The Lost Art of Travel. Harper & Row Publishers Incorporated New York. 1964

[13] Claudia Bell. The accelerated Sublime. Landscape, Tourism and Identity. Published by Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002