Oddlaug Reiakvam
The second arena for private photographic practice involves the extension of
the domestic territory, i.e., the urban space immediately surrounding the
city, where the Sunday promenade takes place
(Figure 2). As a cultural
phenomenon, this leisure activity was generated as a ritual device to affirm
the demarcation between the working time and the free time of the emerging new
civilization. This recreative activity is an ongoing display of family virtues
through their love of outdoor life, thus presenting themselves as cultivated
consumers of nature. The visual representation of this ritualized Sunday
promenade accentuates the civilized bourgeois behaviour in the scene of the
open-air theatre where the principle matter concerns seeing and, in turn, being
seen. The presence of the photographic producer on the outdoor scene has
resulted in a series of stereotyped tableaux (Figures
2, 9-11).
(From left to right: figure 9, 10 and 11)
In the photographic thematization of the institution of the promenade , the persons are posed against a landscape which functions as background to the virtual recurrent family motif, not as an interesting subject for its own sake. Although the city's surroundings consist of interesting vistas, even when the typical standpoints of panorama photography are chosen, the focus is always upon the close family group and their activities, concerning the idyllic play in the family's outdoor scene. In the photographic representation of the ritualized outdoor photography, the autonomy of the family's shielded intimacy is visually maintained and emphasized just as in the "domestic atelier". Within the frame of their symbolically constructed universe, they achieve their family vision through a series of prescribed and fixed poses and postures, correctly dressed according to standard values, wearing the attributes of sex and civil status with pride outside as well as inside the borders of the township civilization. In these pastoral scenes, the family intimacy is the all- embracing theme.
The third arena for photographic thematization is the holiday landscape , where
the family actors are portrayed in the act of realizing their turist project
(Figures 3-4).
Holiday, this industrial capitalist invention which is
quantitatively a small part of the year, is qualitatively perceived as a
guarantee for self-realization and adventure. It is the time to "really live",
literally speaking. Those who "really lived" in this actual historical period
are members of the bourgoisie, transformed into tourists, and one of the
significant marks of a true tourist is photographic activity. Photographic
practice functions as a vehicle for experience, as a ritual aid to create order
and system in time and space, and as evidence that the journey has taken place.
According to Bourdieu, the practice of photography is not only what one does on
holiday, it is also what makes a holiday. The classic holiday photography
"...is trying to consecrate the unique encounter ... between a person and a
consecrated place, between an exceptional moment in one's life and a place that
is exceptional by virue of its high symbolic yield" (Un art moyen 60).
For the Norwegian bourgoisie at the turn of the century, the starting point of modern mass tourism, those "consecrated places" were to be found along the tourist routes. These were established in the pioneer time of the European Grand Tour at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the wild Norwegian nature and the exotic folk life as travel goals.
As the recorder of the family chronicle, the photographer is participating in the tourism as an activity, but at the same time he is reponsible for the photographic selection of motifs, which, in turn, has an influence on, as well as defines, the total adventure. While the selection of motifs of the domestic studio reportages are aesthetically anchored in the picture conventions of the professional studio, the motifs of the "outdoor scene" are intricate touchstones of the aesthetics of popular photography. This aesthetic is subordinated a dual claim which is contradictory to conventional solutions in the pictorial tradition of landscape photography: That is, how to capture the grandiose panorama and, at the same time, make it one's own property, to label the unfamiliar territory by situating a family member - the real proof - between the lenses and the landscape. The problem for the photographer is to find acceptable compromises in order to unite nature and the tourist in one and the same pictorial expression.
A conventional solution to this dilemma is
displayed in Figure 12,
where the photographic representation of an encounter
with nature exploits schemata which often are understood as the typical
realism of the snapshot. The amputated creature emerging into the edge of the
picture might stand as an exponent for this widespread practice; a realism
which, according to Bourdieu, is a paradoxical version of realism. In the
struggle to include all the essential elements inside the edges of the image -
which in this connection means a famous landscape and a family member - what
is achieved is not the registration of some "reality", but a socially filtered
and strongly stylisized image of reality, that is, of the social values
expressed by photographic practice. This paradoxical realism is connected with
an underlying functionalism, where the aesthetic and moral categories are bound
together in the requirement that the images should represent something worth
photographing, and thereby possess a comprehensible function.
In the collection under consideration, the visual structuring of the holiday
crystallized as sequences comprising unique encounters with nature and culture
in two different arenas: One of them displays trips into the countryside,
based on kinship and friendship relations, where the family group is
celebrating its joyful togetherness (Figure 3).
The other is a "love for
nature-project" with only two family actors transformed into mountaineers,
traveling in the wild mountains of Southern Norway (
Figure 4). The first
mentioned picture category depicts picturesque scenarios where the posing
repertoire includes playful games in a rural setting with the bougeois family
acting as peasants equipped with rakes and haystacks, thus preserving family
intimacy and autonomy as the central theme. The journeys into the potentially
threatening holiday landscape of the wilderness, however, implies that a new
kind of experience and a new pattern of visual perception is activated.
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