“Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality, and of realism.”
-Susan Sontag, On Photography
I was Here is an on-going project that explores and documents the role of the tourist photographer as the determiner of reality, the marker of existence. Each image taken by the tourist photographer is a statement of authenticity – this is my moment, this is my space, I was here.
This act of deliberate documentation by the individual is rampant in nearly all societies – even in camera-phobic Australia, where those sporting professional cameras are sometimes met with suspicion and at times, hostility, yet high-Megapixel-count smartphones, compact cameras and digital video recorders are a must-have symbol of status. Both reactions to the camera and the image attest to the belief in the power of the image to reflect reality. It’s almost like a soul-snatching device.
What I wonder is, if we didn’t take pictures to document our vacations, our leisure time, our families, our lives, would we have lived less authentically? Would our experiences be less real because there are no photographs? I have acquaintances who do not possess baby photographs or even toddler photographs of themselves and this disturbs them. How did I exist, they wonder. Was I adopted? Why was I not important enough to have been made authentic?