I have been preparing for Assignment 5 by reading the brief and making a mind map as suggested while reading Behind the Image – (Fox and Caruana, 2012). I found this experience extremely useful in formulating ideas and structuring which were the most important issues to consider surrounding the project.
My basic idea I arrived at was I would be taking a spoof tourist role, documenting my experience in the city from the perspective of a tourist in London, with myself falling for the usual tourist traps and hotspots/landmarks that a usual tourist would but with twists in the photos used to document this act. The twists would be present in order for the viewer to be able to discern it was a spoof tourist role I was taking. The problem I could foresee with this was getting the spoof aspect to be obvious enough that the viewer could discern this was a parody.
I have felt sometimes my work when it is formed from theoretical ideas to practical photographs lacks subtlety. I would like to veer away from this trend but I’ve found it really hard to do for the conceptualisation of this project, perhaps because tourism and photography are intrinsically linked and tourism has many crude traits. One solution to this problem would be to embrace the crudeness although photographers like Martin Parr with Small World (Parr, 1995) have already thought of this. My approaches include photographing with my main camera through the ‘viewfinder’ of my smartphone the shots a tourist might take. This introduces a (crude) first-person perspective to my photographs, is it subjective though? Also if I was in the first-person would I mimic being a tourist or a voyeur of tourists, i.e. am I looking through a viewfinder that is first or third person and simulating the experience or observing the experience?
Another approach, in order to negate the difficulty of just imitating Martin Parr etc and photographing tourists in their natural habitat, would be to photograph my local area from the standpoint of a tourist, embracing the vernacular of the tourist aesthetic to make it obvious I’m a tourist. However, I could perhaps offer insight into some of the less obvious spaces of my local area. The difficulty with this is that most of the tourist photos I see are selfies and achieving a series of shots where the selfie doesn’t just look like someone taking a usual selfie is challenging.
I looked back at why it was I wanted to take the role of the spoof tourist and one reason was the repetitive nature of the tourist activity really interests me; the fact that there are loads of tourists but often they partake in the same or similar experiences. Therefore I considered doing the same-ish shot of a tourist taking a picture of a landmark but with a different tourist each time multiple times. Then do this with a set of the most famous landmarks which would explore the souvenir of the experience the average tourist often feels they want to take away with them also.
References:
Caruana, N. and Fox, A. (2012). Behind the Image. 1st ed. Lausanne: AVA Publishing, pp.28-29.
Documentary 
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