Opinion: Preferring TikTok over a tuk-tuk has diminished travel photography

When I was very young my father used to shoot on slide film. This meant that, whenever we returned from travelling, images of our trips were either viewed on a handheld battery-powered slide viewer, passed around from person to person, or en masse via a slide projector directed at the wall of our entrance hall.

My Dad’s projector turned photo sharing into a quasi-cinematic experience, to which several neighbours were usually invited. In return for politely feigned interest in our trips to Benidorm, Majorca and Aberystwyth, they’d be rewarded with vol-au-vents and sherry.

Fast forward to today and it’s those posting / publishing their travel photography on social media who do so in the expectation of themselves being rewarded; albeit not with flaky pastries but profile-boosting ‘likes’.

It’s not just pictures of far-flung destinations either – it’s shots in the taxi, at the airport and collecting baggage getting posted willy-nilly to social media. Never mind waiting to land; we’ve posted something on TikTok before we’ve even set foot in a tuk-tuk. In other words, most so-called travel photography we see these days, instead of being the subject of glossy Sunday paper supplements, National Geographic or Amateur Photographer, is online and is distinctly amateur.

Granted, the vast number of images being taken every day means that there are some very talented amateurs producing amazing, Instagram-worthy travel photography, alongside whichever professionals are still earning a shrinking crust from doing so. But the vast majority is selfies that have little value to anyone beyond the person who took them or, at best, a close circle of friends and family.

The problem is that any travel photography we see online is, by and large, not curated. Once there was something called a picture editor whose job it was to sift through 100s and 1000s of travel images and select only the best ones for publication. Sure, that was subjective, and the digital splurge of imagery now available to us when we scroll through our feeds feels in some ways more democratic. But at least skilled professionals previously filtered out the dross.

Nowadays we have a lot of dross because, for most, travel photography says less about the place and more about the person taking the shot. It fulfils a need to portray an image of ourselves online that is ‘better’ than our day-to-day reality, and therefore less authentic. It’s a mindset we’ve all become so used to, we do it automatically. After all, digital photography and now various AI tools have enabled us to quickly edit and boost the appearance of ourselves and our surroundings for decades. Why shouldn’t that extend to our travel photography and holiday snaps?

And yet I crave authenticity. Like my Dad’s slide photography of the 1970s and 80s, where what we saw was what we got, with no digital malarkey fudging reality or altering memory.

After my father died a couple of years ago, at the tail-end of the pandemic where we’d not been able to travel anywhere, I realised that the strongest memories I had of him were on those family holidays we shared together. The funny thing is… the images in my head are now far stronger and more vivid than the renditions caught on silver halide or constructed from millions of pixels. By contrast, I wonder how long a TikTok post will live on in the memory.

Anyone for a vol-au-vent?

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The views expressed in this column are not necessarily those of Amateur Photographer magazine or Kelsey Media Limited. If you have an opinion you’d like to share on this topic, or any other photography related subject, email: [email protected]

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