The Eyes of The Street Look Back: In Kolkata with a Camera Around my Neck

Abstract

Tourist photography is generally regarded as being beyond the pale, even by tourists themselves. While citizens' journalism quickly acquired the status of authenticity and mobile snaps that of cutting-edge cool, tourists and their cameras are still judged to be in irredeemably bad taste. Academic orthodoxy dictates that tourist photography is to be analyzed in terms of the gaze, which turns the tourist, the camera and the person being photographed into broad-brush generalizations. Yet millions of us travel abroad every year, with or without cameras, and find ourselves in foreign environments: this represents the livelihoods for millions of families across the world. Many of us are in search of culture and encounters, not only sunshine and beaches. It is time that we developed a more sophisticated way of analyzing what happens when a tourist turns a corner in a foreign city with a camera around her neck. I explore this taking myself as a case study, a photographing tourist in Kolkata. The essay has three parts: the cultural baggage that many tourists have internalized, my own unexpected experiences in the street, and the political implications of re-appraising the tourists, the interactions, and photographs.