Category: Sophistication (Mastery)

This image works as a small essay on tourism, attention, and the making of cultural value. Its humour lies in repetition: three men adopt near identical gestures, each raising a phone towards the same point. The act of looking has become ritualised. They do not only see the place; they perform the act of seeing it.

From a humanities point of view, the image asks what now counts as experience. Susan Sontag argues that photography can become a way of certifying experience, as though the event has not quite happened until it has been photographed (Sontag, 1977). That idea fits this scene. The men’s bodies lean towards the object, yet their attention passes through devices. The place becomes both site and image, both encounter and proof.

There is also a clear link with John Urry’s idea of the “tourist gaze”. Tourism does not just involve travel; it trains people to look for signs of difference, beauty, history, and authenticity (Urry, 1990). Here, the gaze becomes comic because it is multiplied. Three near-matching acts of attention suggest that the scene has told them how to behave. They appear less like free observers than participants in a shared script.

The photograph also has an art-historical aspect. The repeated figures create a frieze-like rhythm, while the raised hands echo devotional or votive gestures. This lends the scene a faintly sacred quality, but the sacred object has shifted from shrine to screen. The image therefore need not mock the tourists. It can be read with more care as a study of modern pilgrimage: people seeking contact with place, but doing so through the cultural form now most available to them.

The main limit is that the joke is easy to grasp. People photographing the same thing is now a familiar subject. Yet the image gains force through spacing, posture, and repetition. It is not just about phones. It is about how culture shapes the body, tells us where to stand, and teaches us what is worth seeing.

References

Sontag, S. (1977). On photography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Urry, J. (1990). The tourist gaze: Leisure and travel in contemporary societies. Sage.

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The shorter version…

A photo essay on tourism, attention, and the making of cultural value.The image asks “what now counts as experience?” Susan Sontag argued that photography ‘certifies’ experience, as though an event hasn’t happened until it has been photographed.

The men’s bodies are directed towards the object, yet their attention passes through their devices – encounter and proof.

John Urry’s “tourist gaze” is based on the idea that travel trains people to look for difference and authenticity.

Here, three near-matching acts of attention suggest that the scene has told them how to behave. The repeated figures form a frieze, with raised hands in devotional gestures but the sacred object has shifted from shrine to screen – a form of modern pilgrimage.

Another from my ‘clocked’ collection… On the same day… The image turns a small civic rule into a wider question about power, leisure, and public space. Its irony is clear, perhaps almost too clear, but the work gains depth through social tension rather than novelty. The sign marks some people as valid viewers and others as bodies to be managed. Against that, the group’s presence asserts what Lefebvre calls a ‘right to urban life: the right to remain, gather, and take part in shared space’. The decisive moment lies in the backward glance, which may act as Barthes’ punctum, because it pierces the neat joke and makes the photographer (and the viewer) part of the politics too.

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I am slowly building up a collection of images where I, the photographer, have been ‘clocked’ (in other words, ‘seen and reacted to’) by the subject.

It isn’t a ‘project’ as I am not trying to tell a story with the selection and sequence. So we don’t really need any descriptive context.

The image here stands alone. A group of young people have sat together in the lee of a sign that tells them not to congregate. The ironic humour of that is pretty obvious to any English speaker (though it would be potentially lost on others, which is one of the weaknesses of the image).

The act of obviously noticing the photographer is a very simple example of Roland Barthes’ principle of the punctum. Photos lacking a punctum have little to capture the eye of the viewer – such images often do need others and a written narrative – thereby becoming ‘documentary’.

In a street context, it is the coming together of elements that make the image more than a random picture of people sitting together. This is what Cartier Bresson (in translation) described as the ‘decisive moment’ – a fraction of a second sooner or later and it would be lost.

The sociologist, Lefebvre, suggested that we all have a right to congregate – it is an intrinsic human right. However, the growth of far-right thinking in the world, which discourages gatherings other than those in its favour, is said to be compromising this. I refer to this as a ‘social tension’. The political message in this image is one of the defiance of the young people against the event organisers who represent the ‘establishment’. Is there something in the photo that I feel strongly about? That would be this denial of a basic human right. Who gave the organisers the power to tell people not to watch an activity taking part in a public space? The young people, through their defiance are denying the organisers this power, when other people have seemingly acquiesced.

To raise our game as photographers (let alone street ones) we try to go beyond simple observation, aesthetic considerations, and technicalities. We play with the underlying theories that our forebears articulated, testing and occasionally improving on them. That leads to progress in our own practice, to the advancement of the discipline, and to change in society. Otherwise, we might as well stay in bed. 😉