Recently The Guardian ran an article reporting that India is to crackdown on what are termed “human safaris” where comparatively rich tourists visit the Jarawa tribe people of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal.
The Jarawa people have long been isolated from the rest of the world and are now being affected by a major road built across their land by the Indian government. A video accompanied the report showing Indian tourists getting the tribes people to dance for food.
Of course we sympathise with the Jarawar and abhor the idea that tourists casually throw them food in order to capture a few second of video footage.
But are we so very different? As a keen photographer I keep an eye on Flickr and, today, I came across this picture which appealed to me. The picture shows a couple of Ugandan children walking down a dirt road carrying baggage on their heads. The girl also carries a large container probably for water. It’s a nice shot. The colours are subtly beautiful and the girl’s expression is interesting.
But take a step back here. How would we feel if tourists wandered around poor areas of America with expensive cameras, capturing images of people struggling with bags and then drove back to their hotels in the evening to eat and drink too much?
I am in no way condemning the photographer of this shot. I have taken similar pictures and have to defend photography as an art form and state that, while the streets of western countries are fantastic subjects for photography the scale is less and less human. The beauty of pictures such as The Long Way Home may be related to their simplicity and humanity.
I guess there have always been disparities in wealth and power between the haves and have nots but these days cheap air travel seems to allow we who live in the rich world to objectify people from the “developing world” without a thought.
Big Think have identified a couple of guys named Mike McCandless and Eric Fischer who, between them, have created maps of the world showing in which locations people are tweeting in which languages. Very interesting though it seems to have set off something of an argument about Catalan on, what I assume, is the initial Flickr post.
The languages broadly follow state boundaries as far as I can see though German tweeting does seem to extend down through the Czech Republic and Slovakia but th least said about that the better.
It could be, of course, that this map will cause horrendous war throughout Europe as each states seeks to include all their nationals within their borders. It’s an interesting idea. As far as I know, the Nation State only really came about in the 20th century. By this I mean the concept that a state should be made up of the land where one specific national people live. Prior to that it was all empires and most people didn’t really get much choice in who ruled them.
I wonder if, armed with maps such as this, states may try to fine tune their borders as the Germans so famously did in 1939. If so then it might be a recipe for continuous warfare as borders would need to change every time a person left their home.
In case any politicians are leaning in this direction I already have a solution. Given the power of information technology, it should be possible to have virtual nation states which exist on the land currently occupied by all citizens of that nation. Each would have a zone around them extending perhaps one metre which would be ruled under the laws of their nation state. It would mean everybody would need to be tracked by GPS but this should be no problem – If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear – I jest of course. I’m sure that Moslems would love such as idea as it would mean that they could enforce Sharia Law though I do see complications when people of different nations interact. Perhaps there could be some kind of default law which governed public spaces or some kind of weighted precedents based on power and status as there is today with fucking bankers and politicians!!!! – ahem…excuse the outburst.
Next year analogue terrestrial TV in the UK is to be shut down. I like to think of this as The Death Of Television and hope that it will occur at midnight, after they have played the National Anthem, the screen has gone dead and the bloke has reminded us to switch off our sets and remove the plug from the socket. We will then have to take up Digital TV if we want to continue to endure the mindless drivel currently delivered by our existing apparatus.
With the Death Of Television, radio “bandwidth” will be freed up and the question arises (to misquote Churchill): To what use will it be put?
The Death Of Radio is not going so smoothly. The BBC goes through phases of telling us that the roll out of Digital Audio Radio (DAB) is almost complete and pretty soon they are going to switch off FM. After the ensuring uproar from various Radio 4 listeners living in peat bogs on Dartmoor the Beeb go a bit quiet for a while but are usually back a few months later claiming it is nearly finished again.
Personally I think DAB may have been an enormous, publicly funded, blunder (EPFB). Yes, we all know that you can shove more rubbish down a DAB transmission than you can down AM or FM but the truth is that no cars have DAB radios and the quality and reliability of FM re-transmitters is appalling.
I am always bemused to hear some, otherwise intelligent, BBC boffin banging on about the superiority of DAB and then suggesting that we use FM re-transmitters to receive it in our cars. They’re TALKING BOLLOCKS. It’s a non starter.
I rant, as is my want, but I have a point. I believe that, “the way forward”, (as our poor corporatised youth have been taught to talk about the future as if we are actually on a well planned journey somewhere rather than merely meandering around aimlessly grasping at straws on a our way to God knows where) is to, not only close down analogue TV, but to close down DAB too. And I wouldn’t stop there. Shut down AM, shut down FM. No more Short Wave Lilliiburlero to the Commonwealth, no more radio controlled toy cars and aeroplanes. Take away the police walky talkies. Let the Ambulance radios fall silent. Abolish VHF at sea. Bluetooth, traffic information, throw the master switch on the lot. Shut it all down.
Has Jones taken leave of his senses you ask? Is Talking Bollocks now advocating complete anarchy? There will be questions in The House.
But wait, there is method in my madness. I suspect that the allocation of radio bandwidth has taken place in a fairly piecemeal way since the origin of radio and we are now in a position where a selection of rival technologies compete for bandwidth.
This sort of thing happens with all technologies. The infrastructure evolves ad hoc during a learning phase and then, once it’s all pretty much understood, it’s time for a redesign taking into account all that has been learned.
Why not discontinue all technologies save one? Why not use a single technology for everything? I am suggesting that some kind of packet radio, such as used by Wifi or GPRS, would be capable of handling TV, Radio, walky-talkies and everything else if it just had enough bandwidth.
If we free up the bandwidth currently used by everything else we can allocate it all to packet radio and have Fast Always On Internet Everywhere. (FAOIE). You want to watch a film? Download via The Internet. You want to watch BBC1? Connect via The Internet. You want to fly your model aeroplane? Set up an Internet connection. Does a hospital need to talk to an Ambulance? Use Skype.
OK, OK, this may not be completely practical. There are probably reasons that Bluetooth uses the frequency it does and I expect that Jodrell Bank will insist on certain dead zones for radio astronomy but you get the idea. Use all the bandwidth for wireless Internet and use the Internet for all communications.
The only limitation would become: is there enough bandwidth for every human and every autonomous device? Good question.
Tonight is Guy Fawkes Night and I posted a picture of fireworks on FaceSpace. An American friend asked what the holiday was. I told her that Guy Fawkes tried to blow up parliament in 1605 and now we burn him in effigy every November the 5th. Yes, it is a little weird, but on the plus side we get to stand around a huge bonfire on a cold November evening and eat hot jacket potatoes. I went on to suggest that the Americans do something similar with Osama Bin bloody Laden.
The Americans should create a national day of celebration where Bin Ladin is burned in effigy on top of a bonfire. If they followed the English model then young kids would stomp around in the mud waving sparklers and devouring hot Bin Laden night potatoes in their jackets…mmmmmm. The adults could drink beer and talk bollocks. The goal being to draw the poison by ridiculing the bastards and having a good time.
Remember, remember the fifth of November The gunpowder treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot.
I just caught bits of The Culture Show on BBC 2. One bloke was interviewing another bloke as they sat on a large luxury motor yacht. It seems that one of them was working for the program and the other was an “artist”. The artist had a concept for an art work which was this luxury motor yacht with his name stamped on it and no other changes. The artist was a German named Christian Jankowski at this year’s Frieze Art Fair.
In fact the art work had not yet been created. First he intended to sell the concept to a punter and then the work would be created. The interviewer asked if he got any flack along the lines of anyone could do this and it’s not art. Yawn!
In 1917 Marcel Duchamp created a work of art entitled Fountain consisting of a urinal which had been signed by M. Duchamp. This, apparently, kicked off the discussion: Is it art? Who says what is art? If I am an artist then anything I created is art. The circular logic of such and argument etc etc.
M. Duchamp opened the door for nearly a century of boring and uninspired people to duck out of real creativity and spend their time climbing up their own arses.
It is true that the vast majority of the world’s population will not have heard of M. Duchamp and his exploits and it’s true that many popular newspapers will rant against such art. But for artist of today, to fall back on ideas that are nearly a century old as justification for their work woud be laughable if the media did not insist on treating the argument so seriously.
The type of artist who get off on this sort of piffle is the same sort of person who, were he a computer geek, would spend his time condescendingly boring all and sundry with details of the technical implantation of his latest box of chips.
Of course a luxury motor yacht is a work of art but it’s artistry is no more imbued by a supposed artist plonking his name on it than a Range Rover is by attaching the word Vogue or a Panasonic camera is by rebadging it as a Leica and marking it up £150.
These activities are not art they are mere marketing.
For a contemporary artist to make Duchamp’s ideas the centre piece for his work shows a pitiful lack of imagination and it is not surprising that many artists in this tradition appear so passionless and vague. In this evening’s Culture Show it became evident that many artists will never challenge an interpretation of their work. Apparently they want to leave the interpretation open. Here we run into yet another stock cliché of the contemporary art world: the idea that each person will have their own impression of an art work. Many artists have misinterpreted this as meaning that an artist should have no ideas or incites of his or her own. These seems to me to be the antithesis of an artist.
I listened to the first part of Mike Oldfield‘s Ommadawn this morning and it struck me that, without wanting to detract from Mr. Oldfield’s skill and achievements, his work was a product of it’s time. Technology had progressed to the point where musicians could afford recording studios in their own houses and this allowed Mr. Oldfield to create a work where he played all the instruments. When Tubular Bells was released in 1973 this was amazing yet today kids have more powerful studios in their bedrooms.
Technology enables art.
In the 80s the Western world became rich. Many of the newly rich had no knowledge of, and therefore no preconceptions and prejudices about, art. Further, many were not really interested in art yet wanted the qudos that art provides. This left the way open for self appointed gate keepers such as Charles Saatchi to milk the rich while pursuing his passion for modern art.
Artists embraced this culture and began creating all sorts of stuff but I can’t help thinking that Damien Hirst‘s sharks were, really, no more that the product of new money looking for sensation. The money was there to pay for Hirst to turn his childhood hobby of fish taxidermy into a business. So he did.
None of this is to denigrate contemporary art. 90% of it may be shit but in the words of the late, and great, Theordore Sturgeon “90% of everything is shit” and Mr. Saatchi has done the nation a huge service by presenting more than 10% of it at the fantastic Saatchi Gallery.
What I object to is lame and passionless artists, unable to think of new ideas and so falling back on the ideas of an artist who’s been dead for over forty years.
To be more explicit: Forget whether it’s art, is it any good?
I have long admired Shami Chakrabati. Mainly because of her determined, intelligent and reasoned support for human rights but also because she’s short, dark and gorgeous. So when I heard her speak on Any Questions on Friday I felt my opinions were being well represented. Even on the subject of the NHS, where she admitted was a layman, she made some good points.
Then Simon Jenkins, chairman of the National Trust, said that he thought that health services in the world which appeared to work best are those where the county council pays but delivery is handled by private companies and he highlighted Scandinavia as exponents of this style of health care. Ms. Chakrabati then had a hissy fit and derided the idea that “rare cancers” and “heart surgery” should be handed by “parish councils”. Amazing! Ms. Chakrabati, of whom I expect intelligent and honest debate, had drifted off into the tactics of New Labour and was deriding an argument that had not been made.
In a democracy it is right that there is debate over ownership of industry and public services but what I find objectionable about “the left” is their automatic assumption that they have the moral high ground. They don’t. It is perfectly moral to argue that private companies are, overall, more competent than large state run organisations. Any debate should be over technical aspects such as quality of delivery and costs.
I am old enough to remember the monolithic nationalised industries which were the norm in the 60s and 70s and I well recall their arrogant disregard for their customers. I dislike the hyper-commercialism of the 21st century but would not welcome a return to the days when public services were run for the benefit of their workers and British Leyland thought that innovation meant square steering wheels.
The lesson here is that, while Ms. Chakrabati is an absolute heroine on the topic of human rights, we should resist the urge to idealise her. Idealising leaders must be some kind of natural human drive as we tend to do it quite a lot. These days pop stars seem to gain most from this phenomena though why we should consider that singers are any more intelligent or moral than the rest of us I don’t know. I remember seeing Madonna in a documentary and was gob smacked by the shallow drivel which she spouted. (Telling her father she couldn’t tone down her act because it would be “….compromising my artistic integrity….” – Yeh, OK, just zip yourself up and sing your song ay love!.)
Like many people I was impressed by Barack Obama when he became president. His speeches seem moral and reasoned. However, one of his first acts, on gaining office, was to address the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and declare that Jerusalem should remain the undivided capital of Israel handing the Israelis a victory and betraying the Palestinians without even understanding what he had done. One might also wonder why the President thought his first action should be to address AIPAC at all. To be fair to him I think this was probably an honest mistake on his part but it does show once again that our leaders have feet of clay.
Men are not Gods and should not be worshiped. Some opinions of some leaders will concur with our own, but many will not.
Bob Dylan said it best: “Don’t follow leaders”. What a guy, he’s my hero….D’oh!!!
When I was a kid I was into the space program. I stayed up late watching the moon landing and I dreamed that, one day, I would watch a launch at Cape Canaveral in Florida. I bought all the model rocket kits and was a bit unique in this respect as most kids of my age were into football or kung fu. In the evenings I would stay up to listen to the “Bongs” of News at Ten to see if there was an item on the space program. Gradually, after 1969, the space program lost momentum and fewer and fewer bongs included astronauts. The public had become blasé about space.
No matter, I had discovered Science Fiction. I started on Marvel comics. The outsider characters were my favourites: Spiderman, The Hulk, the Silver Surfer. I graduated to the novels of Ray Bradbury, Michael Moorcock and Phillip K. Dick. I eagerly devoured the meagre diet of Science Fiction films which were screened on British TV: The Day The Earth Stood Still, Silent Running and Dark Star. I was regarded as a little eccentric by my peers. One guy told me that I could see a brick and think it looked like a space ship……and I could.
I listened to Hawkwind and Tangerine Dream and subscribed to two magazines: Omni and Analog. These ran Science Fiction stories alongside the latest thinking in science and technology. I discovered the wonder of fractals and read about memes, chaos theory, alternative universes and virtual reality.
In 1977 Star Wars and Closer Encounters Of The Third Kind were released and at last we had big budget films with fantastic special effects. Science Fiction was suddenly popular.
I studied computer science at school and got a job as a computer operator working on minicomputers known as PDP11s running an operating system called RSTS/E. Our first machine had 96K of RAM and the disk drives were the size of washing machines and held 40 megabytes each. Locked away in machine rooms with computers the size of wardrobes I was pigeon holed, not as a “techy”, but as a “computer person”. Nobody knew what we did and nobody set any rules. We dressed how we wanted, we worked how we wanted and we had a lot of fun. Moving to London I discovered an obscure science fiction book shop in Denmark Street called Forbidden Planet.
Home PCs became available and it was possible to create fractal images with the press of a button. Computer gaming got going and the simple text based games such as Advent and Dungeon, which I had played at work, were replaced by full colour shoot ‘em ups.
Something odd was happening: My interests were becoming main stream. The popular media seemed to be mining my childhood for ideas.
In 1982 Blade Runner was released and suddenly all the weird and disturbing themes of Phillip K. Dick were simplified, tarted up and splashed all over the big screen. A fantastic film yet the special effects and the charisma of the actors overshadowed the subtle and mundane realism with which Dick somehow manages to portray the strange and insidious.
In the 80s a wave of technology based innovation ran through finance and banking and governments deregulated. Money sloshed around the industry and fortunes were made. Computers became ubiquitous and as fast as Intel improved the hardware capacity Microsoft bloatware ate it up. People started paying allegiance to software vendors as if they were football teams; Windows vs OS2, Windows NT vs Netware and, these days, iPhone vs Android. Had we all lost the plot?
Publishers such as New Riders churned out endless poorly edited books claiming to teach IT but which were little more than rewritten documentation. Computer departments appeared in book shops. In the early 80s I struggled to find books on operating systems and networking but by 1990 the computer departments in bookshops were ballooning and Foyles devoted a whole floor.
The money attracted Price Waterhouse and KPMG who read a few books on technology, set themselves up as consultants and started selling the bleeding obvious back to customers. The smooth talking suits followed a simple creed: “Bullshit baffles brains” and if there was one thing they knew about it was bullshit.
Hollywood made feature length versions of the old Marvel comic books. Batman in 1989 then moving on to the anti-heroes of my youth, Spiderman in 2002 and the Silver Surfer in 2007.
In 2001 the Lord of The Rings was released. Hold on, this was getting personal. Was nothing from my childhood sacred? It seemed that the very stuff of my psyche was being commandeered by the corporations. The fabric of my personal philosophy was being ground up, digested and regurgitated back at me stripped of subtlety, emotion and meaning.
However, the seeds of doubt were always present and I had picked up on them in my youth. Now the dystopian ideas of Phillip K. Dick were taken up by new authors such as William Gibson and transformed into cyberpunk. In 1999 The Matrix was released portraying a sinister world in which humanity lived unknowingly in a virtual world while their physical bodies lay inert.
The marketing industry got into its stride and started targeting our sub-conscious. We mortgaged our futures to pay for the dreams used to sell deodorant. As Dick had predicted the corporations bent reality to maximise their profits.
This week Hollywood are, again, engaged in recycling cultural icons from the past. A new movie has been released based on the marvel comic book character Captain America. Perhaps, at this time of conflict and economic uncertainty, America is trying to return to its youth. Trying to revert to those days when most of us had faith in science, democracy and the future.
But what does the future hold? What stories or icons or memes of today will Hollywood recycle in thirty years time? Corporations cannot generate art they can only package and sell it. They can only reproduce existing ideas so where are the ideas? The blind optimism of the 60s and 70s is as outdated as the cynical greed of the 80s and 90s.
It’s time for a new direction but our compass is still spinning.
So why do I feel optimistic? Right now we are on the cusp of change. Right now is when the seeds of the future are being sown. I am maturing in years and rather than thinking about spaceships and time travel I find myself speculating about pensions and politicians. I suspect that the young already have an idea of where we’re going.
It would be nice if they shared it with the rest of us.
The people of Berlin are protesting about the large number of tourists who visit their city and I have every sympathy.
Mass tourism is a scourge on society. The enormous buses clog our streets obscuring the very views that the tourists have come to see and eventually the local culture is displaced by an international tourist culture of burgers, beer and bullshit. Local charm is replaced by shops selling plastic beefeaters and pictures of how things used to be before mass tourism.
We all love to travel and from the tourists point of view mass tourism is a boon enabling us to see the world. Without mass tourism many of us would have no experience of anything outside our immediate vicinity.
But mass tourism destroys the thing it loves. A herd of tourists cannot visit a city without damaging it like some socio-economic version of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
When a person reads of the Left Bank in Paris he learns of Picasso, Matisse and Hemingway. He thinks that he too must experience this seminal environment and he buys his ticket. But the locals have seen him coming. They know that the age of art has passed and the age of commerce is upon us. So they open themed cafés, bars and restaurants with names like Bar Les Artistes or Le Lucernaire.
When our gallant traveller arrives he finds that he is not rubbing shoulders with writers or poets but engaged in a drinking competitions with a IT Administrator from Milton Keynes. Our intellectual explorer is now in the minority. The majority of the clientele are not interested in culture but feel they should “take a look while we’re here”. They have been sold culture in the same way that they are sold breakfast cereal and aftershave.
Our cities become caricatures of themselves, Ko Samui becomes Blackpool and an Indian tourists sits and enjoys the ambiance of Paris while eating a Big Mac.
The tourist industry markets travel as a liberating experience but mass tourism is not so much a manifestation of freedom as of greed, globalisation and hyper-commercialisation.
The population of Greater London is estimated at approximately 7.7 Million people. Wikipedia considers that London receives 15 million tourists each year and it is a safe bet that the vast majority of these concentrate their activity in central London. At the moment, the tourist industry sees no limits on how many people it can push down the subway at Oxford Circus. This has been detrimental to the quality of life of Londoners and no doubt Berliners suffer similarly and so are right to object.
Industry and commerce have long involved the appropriation of commonly held land for exploitation by self appointed “owners”. Communism recognises this when it declares that “property is theft”. We generally consider this property to be land used for homes, farms or factories and we assume that this confiscation means exclusion of the public but we neglect the public space in between private property. We neglect the commons.
This common space is owned, used and valued by all of us yet government and commerce now seem hell bent on exploiting it to herd around disinterested tourists in such wretched conditions that their goal, once they emerge from their air-conditioned packaging, is to take a piss, grab a burger and get back on the bus.
The Tragedy Of The Commons may sound like a Thomas Hardy novel but is, in fact, a concept used by economists. To quote Wikipedia: “The tragedy of the commons is a dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long-term interest for this to happen.”
The scenario usually given is where common land is used by multiple individuals to graze their cattle. It is in the interest of each individual to graze as many cows as possible yet this will eventually ruin the grazing land to the detriment of all.
One solution often proposed is that the commons should be privatised and access restricted to those with the ability to pay. The owner would then work in his own self interest to ensure that the asset was maintained in good condition. This could mean that the owner would limit access but this is, by no means, certain.
Intuitively I am against the continued expansion of the private sphere and I find modern shopping malls a poor replacement for a thriving high street.
Another way of addressing TTOTC is intervention by local government. Legislation could be implemented to limit use and protect the asset. In the case of mass tourism this might mean metropolitan rules restricting the number of Bulk Tourist Deliveries (BTDs) in a given period.
However, local government derives a lot of revenue from allowing companies to graze their tourists in city streets and officials often see their role as maximising revenue. According to Wikipedia “The Government Office for London states that tourism revenues constitute 10 per cent of London’s gross value added and contributes to the employment of up to 13 per cent of London’s workforce. According to the London Development Agency, visitors to London spend around £15bn each year.”
Obviously cities will not wish to give up this revenue but at the moment we are sacrificing our environment for short term profit. Reversing this trend and protecting our cities will make them better places to live and ensure that they continue to attract tourists well into the future.
Many years ago, over too many pints, I recall discussing the idea of creating a tour operator which would specialise in giving tourists an authentic night out in London. We would offer a standard service tailored to the Japanese businessman and start with a few pints in a local boozer followed by a trip on a big red double decker bus down to Fitzrovia. More pints would be consumed and a Japanese man would be cajoled into thinking that his beer was off and pushed into taking it back to the bar. The barman would be bribed to take a sip, pause, frown and then apologise profusely before telling the Japanese businessman that he had a “very discerning pallet sir”. More beer would be consumed and the Japanese businessman encouraged to approach a specific young woman who would be bribed to slap him soundly around the face.
The frivolities would continue in an Indian Restaurant where large portions of Vindaloo would be consumed and the waiter paid to talk some bollocks about how this was the hottest curry ever consumed. Eventually the tourists would be emptied into taxis and left to find their own way home when hopefully a minority would vomit in the back of the cab and end the night sleeping in a railway station.
The company was to be called Here We Go Tours and we considered that visiting Australians would make the best tour guides.
The 20th century was the age of standardisation, the production line and economies of scale. The 21st century looks set to change all that. From Internet shopping to 3D printing, globalisation and technology are enabling consumers to customise their purchases to suit their tastes. House swaps and couch surfing are two examples of how independent travellers are using The Internet to bypass the mass tourism industry.
Why not go further, why not reject the standardised tours set by self appointed experts and design your own itinerary? In the past this may have been difficult but in the 21st century the tools are readily available. The Internet allows us to research an area, Google Street View lets us wander the streets before we get there and our GPS equipped smartphones allow us to navigate once we get there.
Why not create an itinerary and share it with your friends on Facebook?
The concept of tourists destroying what they visit is not new and was deftly described in a 1975 Science Fiction story by Garry Kilworth named “Let’s Go to Golgotha”. To quote Wikipedia: “In the future period where the story takes place, time travel has been invented and made commercially available. Among other historical events, tourists can book a time-travelling “Crucifixion Tour.” Before setting out, the tourists are strictly warned that they must not do anything to disrupt history. Specifically, when the crowd is asked whether Jesus or Barabbas should be spared, they must all join the call “Give us Barabbas!”. (A priest absolves them from any guilt for so doing). However, when the moment comes, the protagonist suddenly realizes that the crowd condemning Jesus to the cross is composed entirely of tourists from the future, and that no actual Jewish Jerusalemites of 33 AD are present at all.”
Photography
travel photography – Objectifying the subject
Tags: Andaman Islands, Art, cameras, developing world, flickr, human safaris, India, Jarawa, Jarawa people, photographer, photography, The Guardian, The Long Way Home, Tourism, tourists, Travel, Uganda
The Long Way Home
Recently The Guardian ran an article reporting that India is to crackdown on what are termed “human safaris” where comparatively rich tourists visit the Jarawa tribe people of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal.
The Jarawa people have long been isolated from the rest of the world and are now being affected by a major road built across their land by the Indian government. A video accompanied the report showing Indian tourists getting the tribes people to dance for food.
Of course we sympathise with the Jarawar and abhor the idea that tourists casually throw them food in order to capture a few second of video footage.
But are we so very different? As a keen photographer I keep an eye on Flickr and, today, I came across this picture which appealed to me. The picture shows a couple of Ugandan children walking down a dirt road carrying baggage on their heads. The girl also carries a large container probably for water. It’s a nice shot. The colours are subtly beautiful and the girl’s expression is interesting.
But take a step back here. How would we feel if tourists wandered around poor areas of America with expensive cameras, capturing images of people struggling with bags and then drove back to their hotels in the evening to eat and drink too much?
I am in no way condemning the photographer of this shot. I have taken similar pictures and have to defend photography as an art form and state that, while the streets of western countries are fantastic subjects for photography the scale is less and less human. The beauty of pictures such as The Long Way Home may be related to their simplicity and humanity.
I guess there have always been disparities in wealth and power between the haves and have nots but these days cheap air travel seems to allow we who live in the rich world to objectify people from the “developing world” without a thought.
Vietnamese Girls