Tourism in the Age of the Digital Camera

Picture this: Our visit to France’s picturesque Loire Valley is a perfect retreat from Paris’ hustle and bustle. The day began in Amboise with a little sun, switching to overcast skies as if Mother Nature wanted us to see the countryside in varying shades of light. We quickly escape the nascent downpour in Tours, jump into the car and head to the Chateau de Chenonceau, a marvel of French Renaissance architecture that doubled as a secret smuggling tunnel for the French Resistance of WWII. We make a bee-line for the entrance to avoid a soaking from the mid-May showers. We make it to dry ground at the entrance only to be stopped in our tracks. The culprit? A throng of amateur photographers, intent on recording every single second of their vacation to digital memory.

Now before you hide your head in shame (because you know I’m talking about you, whoever you are), I too own a digital camera. Every once in a while, I will also break out this camera to take a silly picture of a wall, a staircase, a painting or my wife. We’ve got dozens of gigs of memory on our respective laptops that have been filled with photos that will help us fondly remember our trip to the Topkapi Palace. In short, I’m part of the problem, and am far from being a part of the solution.

Nevertheless, the problem with the digital camera is its nearly limitless capacity to take stupid photos, delete them, and then take them again. In the past, a photo was a relatively expensive commodity...one needed to be sure of the value of the photo in order to justify committing it to film and paying for it to be developed. There was no instant check on the quality of the photo, so one snapshot was normally sufficient (generations of amateur photogs learned the hard way that their finger was covering the lens, or that the flash didn’t go off like it should have). The digital camera, on the other hand, can give you instant feedback about how bad a photographer you are...but no matter how bad it was the first time, digital camera users usually opt for that second shot to try and make up for the first. And the third shot to try and make up for the second. And so on, and so on...

Another favored tactic is the saturation approach. Take as many photos as you can, and hope that some of them turn out. This leads to one of my favorite sights at any tourist destination...the tourist being led by his camera, manically snapping up photos of anything that passes in front of his lens. Ditto this for the amateur videographers...if you wanted to see the Louvre through a digital LCD, why not just watch the Travel Channel and save a few thousand bucks.

And don’t get me started on the group photo. When I chaperoned my high school students on their trip to England, I believe I snapped their group photo on about 15 different digital cameras. Isn’t one or two enough? Are we really so misanthropic to think that the person whose camera contains the group photo won’t share it with the rest of the group?

That’s not to say that the Digital Camera hasn’t democratized tourism in a way. More than 60% of US households now own at least one digital camera, and my guess is that among those who still have the means and leisure time to visit rural France, the proportion is markedly higher. This means that almost anyone now has the ability to prove that they went somewhere, saw something, and possibly enjoyed it. And I have nothing against that. What I do find to be irritating is the way in which mass digital camera ownership disrupts the experience of being a tourist, whether it’s you taking the picture or someone else. The increasing ownership of digital cameras, together with the fact that digital cameras are now sold as integral parts of most cell-phones (the quality of some of these cameras being shockingly good) means that their impact upon the tourist industry will continue to grow, for better or for worse.

All this leads me to conclude that the digital camera is tourism’s worst nightmare for two reasons. The first is that all this photo taking bugs the hell out of me. Stop it! The second is that people take photos on trips to take home and show their friends and family that they were there...they saw the Eiffel Tower, went to the top, and took a photo to prove it. Or, they took 200 photos to prove it. But sooner or later, don’t you risk missing the actual experience of being there? Does the digital photo leave the impression that you were gazing down the Seine from your Pont Neuf perch, when in reality, your digital camera did all the gazing for you? My advice to tourists everywhere? Take some good photos to help you remember being there, but most importantly, don’t forget to be there.