There’s a poem in Nayyirah Waheed’s Salt that I think about every time I open Instagram on my phone. The poem literally asks, “Would you still want to travel to that country if you could not take a camera with you,” and in some way has shaped a lot of what I think about travel. In some way, it has also shaped the way I consume instagram, because I think the two are very closely related.
Unfortunately, instagram travel blogs and travel content have made it very hard for me to articulate that I do like to travel, but no, not in that way. The fact that there now exists a monetized occupation that involves going to locations and photographing yourself in them, as a form of marketing, is something I feel troubled about. Because tourism can be exploitative. Cut a little bit beyond the beauty of nature, beyond the hashtag, and you can easily see that many forms of lifestyles and environmental beauties are being paraded for consumption. To me, the question of tourism sits with the question of aesthetics as a performance. To consider a place worth seeing only because it has been touted around on Instagram, that a place has merit for existing because some affluent attractive person made a discovery of it makes me gag.
It’s naive to claim that tourism also doesn’t have benefits. It can improve local economies and provide opportunities for growth and grassroots entrepreneurship. As someone who does travel (with major caveats), I have been privileged to experience many journeys that I would not have otherwise known if they couldn’t be discovered from the internet. I also enjoy many other privileges: such as access to the open internet, fluency in English (which is an open gateway to many countries) and corporate-sponsored travel.
The addition of photography to an intrusive experience by default makes the levels of consuming the experience worse. Who is the picture for? Should we all only visit a place to become free advertising spokespersons for it? Blame me for reading Susan Sontag’s collection of essays On Photography (the full five pages of the essay I read here) at an impressionable age. Sontag’s essay (In Plato’s Cave) characterizes the camera itself as an intrusion. In the essay, she writes that we are so consumed with the idea of image-making (back when the “ubiquitous” camera was a separate hand-held device that you had to carry around everywhere) that we find safety in sheltering ourselves from the real experience.
I would argue that current travel photography is no different. I also see the colonialism inherent in this. Countries would not have to parade themselves as exotic locales to be selected for foreign hedonism if there wasn’t a need to make themselves palatable to strangers. We are so consumed with making the reel-worthy content, making something that is equivalent to an ad, that we are not even sitting with the confrontation of the alien that travel requires. It's not even about what you're experiencing but how you can make a performance of your experience for (possibly thousands) of anonymous followers online.
And I get that the performance is required. We travel to escape from home but we cannot escape some truths: there is struggle and harm everywhere. There are ways in which our very existence mandates such struggle and harm. The real reckoning for me comes from sitting with that reality and folding the consequences of it into an acceptable version I can stomach.
More so, the proliferation of travel photography that centers the visitor, rather than the visited, has a complex nuance to it. On the one hand, I don’t want to be accused of appropriation. Especially as someone who comes from privilege, I’m always worried about dehumanizing a lived experience. And I’m part of a large and vibrant Indian immigrant diaspora. I too have rolled my eyes, scoffed and sneered at every content campaign that tries to say “wow, India is so colorful, amazing and exotic, wow”. On the other hand, pictures of me in a certain place tell you nothing about the place, and instead center my narrative as “look at things I can surround myself with”.
To me, travel is inherently a human experience. Everyone who says they traveled somewhere because the natural surroundings are astounding diminish the fact that it’s humans who are telling the stories, creating the culture, and creating lives around these stunning formations of the planet. The moon and the mountains have existed far before humankind and, hopefully, will outlast us also. If anything, the very ability to travel and to experience the foreign in a non-migratory capacity is a human trait.
Image: A hot air balloon trip over the Aztec pyramids at Téotihuacan, Mexico that I snuck into. (I have a fear of heights)
When I travel, I am bound to think of a place in history, its people, how the landscape shaped the people and vice versa. I am bound to ask, what is happening beyond the performance, which is one of the reasons I love traveling for work. When I travel for work, my purpose in the locale is already defined. I am very clearly made to be there for a reason, and the expectations of what I am expected to bring and experience are somewhat defined. This sense of purpose is critical for me to not feel like an uninvited guest. It also absolves me of the voluntourism style travel which used to be favored by the colonial missionaries: justify my presence to the locals as something that benefits them.
For a long time I avoided traveling. My parents have (at least) 183 unique passport stamps between themselves, and I tagged along on a few of their journeys as a child, so the concept itself wasn’t alien to me. My relationship to travel and to instagram changed after graduation of my senior year. My instagram was filled with classmates finally tasting their freedom in European locales while I was staying at home and taking care of my grandparents. It was the last time they would ever be able to make the flight to the States, and they endured a 16hr flight to attend my graduation ceremony. I had responsibilities that kept me at home, and I was young and jealous, basically. I sought to “travel” in the way I could: I spent that entire summer reading slice-of-life literature written by authors about their respective home countries.
Not all of my journeys have had to be consumed via instagram (or perhaps I do not know or care enough about how to communicate the nostalgia in a sexy enough vision), but every one of them has carried an emotional significance for me. Even as a guest, I have been invited into homes and I don’t take that lightly.
I'm writing this post from a family vacation in Serampore, West Bengal. This is a semi-rural town 1.5hrs away from Kolkata (the nearest metropolis) and the town cannot even be triangulated by Google exactly. The town is home to 14 generations of my ancestors descended via my father and I've returned after 7 years, so the land is truly as alien to me as every single childhood photograph of mine staring back at me out of the frames. The lineage has already ended with my father, and I am but one of three offspring who will remember anything meaningful about this place.
There’s a quote I’m probably going to misattribute to Mark Twain which says that the ultimate purpose of travel is that it gives you a new perspective of home, and I’m stranded between both worlds, wondering how do I make my experience relatable on social media, what do I carry forward, and what part of sacred is going to be retained if I don’t take the pictures to begin with?