‘Your’s Truly’: The Creation and Consumption of Commercial Tourist Portraits

Dirk H R Spennemann

doi:10.3390/heritage4040182

Abstract

There is a long history of tourists substantiating their visits to a destination through the purchase of portraits that show them against a backdrop of the local setting. While its initial expression in the form of paintings was confined to the social elite who could afford to commission and sit for an artist, the advent of photography democratized the process, enabling the aspiring middle classes to partake in the custom. While some tourists took their own photographs, the majority relied on local photographers who offered their services in studio and open-air settings. Smaller-sized images, such as Cartes de Visite (2.5″ × 4″) and Cabinet Cards (4.5″ × 6.5″), could be enclosed with letters to family and social circles, thus providing proof of visits while the voyage was still in progress. The development of picture postcards as a postal item in the 1890s, coupled with the manufacture of precut photographic paper with preprinted address fields, revolutionized tourist portraiture. Photographers could set-up outside tourist attractions, where tourists could have their portrait taken with formulaic framing against a canonized background. Efficient production flows meant that tourists could pick up their printed portraits, ready for mailing within an hour. Using examples of San Marc’s Basilica in Venice (Italy), as well as Ostrich Farms in California and Florida (U.S.A.), this paper contextualizes the production and consumption of such commercial tourist portraits as objects of social validation. It discusses their ability to situate the visitor in locales iconic of the destination, substantiating their presence and validating their experience. Given the speed of production (within an hour) and their ability to be immediately mailed through the global postal network, such images were the precursor of the modern-day ‘selfies’ posted on social media.

Highlights

Ever since the advent of commercial photography, photographs have been inseparably intertwined with the tourist experience of the places visited.This paper intersects three aspects of tourist photography: the photography of tourist attractions (‘destination photography’) by tourists, as well as by marketing bodies; the photography of the tourists themselves (‘tourist portraits’); and the dissemination of tourist imagery by postcards
The primary dataset used in this study was picture postcards, and real photo postcards produced by photographic studios and roving photographers at tourist sites
Other examples are images taken by roving photographers at popular parks, capturing images of visitors next to exotic plants printed with varied expanses of writing space (Figure 25)

Summary

Introduction

Ever since the advent of commercial photography, photographs have been inseparably intertwined with the tourist experience of the places visited.This paper intersects three aspects of tourist photography: the photography of tourist attractions (‘destination photography’) by tourists, as well as by marketing bodies; the photography of the tourists themselves (‘tourist portraits’); and the dissemination of tourist imagery by postcards. Much, if not most, of the discussion in the literature centers on the nexus between tourism and photography, with many studies examining the camera-enabled gaze of the tourist toward the ‘other,’ be it people or places visited [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. The second area of research is the production of destination images and perpetuation of clichés by marketing bodies, and the subsequent dissemination of this imagery in promotional materials and in the form of picture postcards [10,11,12,13,14,15,16].

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion