Ritchin speaks of travel in the strangest but potentially truest of ways. His idea about people sending images and doing emails is an idea I do not quite relate, but I can say that when I went home to see my family for Christmas I did facebook my life in my free time, which I assume equivocates to emailing the world of my travels. What I find most disturbing of Ritchin’s “suggestions” about how to solve these issues of which he speaks is that there is no real resolve necessary at this moment. However, even more than that I really dislike the idea of have someone basically Photoshop themselves into tourist places as a means to achieve their “I was here photo”. I love the idea of traveling for the sake of travel with no need to “capture” the moment: I traveled to many concerts and different places in Oregon this summer and found it more important to experience the experience than trying to struggle to keep it for visual recall later. In fact the one time I did this was at a Modest Mouse concert with my sister, she was visiting for the summer and it was her very first concert so for her sake I figured I’d bring my fish eye and have some lasting memories…my memories consist of struggling with film while some girl in a dress drunkenly got on and off some man’s shoulders, only to be followed by my backpack getting stolen some days later with all our “memories” in the bag…I don’t try to save the moment much anymore.
Despite the trauma of the entire event I would rather have no image than a standard image that I just place myself in some weird pre-trip travel log. This really speaks to what Barthes refers to in Camera Lucida as the awareness of the “posed” and the “operator”. The event of actually posing for the camera and/or actually looking through some square and pushing a button of any sort is in itself an event. It gives people the opportunity to attempt to portray them in any way they like at that particular moment.
Furthermore, it seems that somewhere along the lines of photographic history observers have been under the impression that photography creates a “real” world, a truth, but that has never been the case as Paul spoke to about the cannons in Fenton’s The Valley of Death, and especially as seen through Jerry Uelsmann’s work. The magic of photography is that it creates a myth, a seemingly real event or visual that lends a comfort that more is possible. It is as though we live in this world that as Ritchin states, we live with “a sense that disbelief is the only antidote to a spiraling chaos that none of us can do anything about.” It is as though we look to the power of photographs to portray something fantastical as some look to a religion and/or a God, something that says we still have something more than what is presented in our reality, and this works to create a “truth” because we assume there at least at some point was the operator to take the basic photo even before it was manipulated so it must always be part truth…
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