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Photography, claims Susan Sontag, developed in tandem with one of the most basic characteristics of modern activities: tourism. It feels unnatural to travel without an evidence. Martin Parr in his “small world” documents this universal phenomenon and its close ties to photography. His humoristic gaze exposes the similar characteristics of the different touristy attractions. As people travel to remote places to encounter different experiences, Parr exposes the degree to which they have all become the same. They all offer the same amalgam of people from around the world, the same vendors, images and jewelries. A religious Muslim man is selling Christmas souvenirs in Bet-Lechem, and local Indians dressed in a full attire, western tourists in their bathing suits and a local cow – all meet under Goa’s beautiful sky.

Parr consistently pictures sacred or other famous monuments vis a vis the tourist who is occupied with his touristy activities in a way that exemplify Breton’s ‘crucial moment’ (i.e., taking pictures, buying souvenirs, taking a trip on the gondola, riding on donkeys, listening to explanations at the museum). The series of images raise the inevitable questions in regard to authenticity. How special and unique these places really are? What value do these “touristy activities” have? Pictures are touched with pathos and promote nostalgia. To take pictures according to Sontag is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability and mutuality. Can pictures found in the albums of millions of people around the world (i.e., near the Eifel tower, next to the plane, holding Pisa, swimming in the sea of Galilee) can still provoke Pathos? Can they still evoke nostalgia?

Parr’s gaze establishes a hierarchy between him and the tourists that remain on the main predictable homogenic road of “exploring” the world. Is there another way to travel? Do all travelers try to be unique like Parr but cannot help but becoming as trite and common as the tourists he shoots? Is it important—do our experiences lost their value if their form has been shared by many? Or does this form of traveling become more desired once it has been shared by many others (why would so many people go to see Pisa otherwise)?

We have already discussed one question in regard to tourism and photography but since I am still trying to understand it I will reiterate it-- Sontag writes that photography is a way of certifying experience but also a way of refuting it—by limiting the experience to the search of the photogenic. The marriage between photography and tourism reveals one of the most important questions of photography: can we actually be a part of the experience if we are busy capturing it?