Sam Holden
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The Photographers - Part One
(27 images. C-type prints. 20cm x 25cm. 2004/05)
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Shooting Gallery by Adrian Turpin © 2008 ________________________________ Page 1/2
It's hard to imagine there was ever a time when tourism and photography didn't go hand in hand. But it was little more than a century ago that George Eastman foisted his first Kodak camera on an unsuspecting public in Minneapolis. The Number One, as it became known, was to be the most epoch-making black box since Pandora's.
Unlike its forebears, Eastman's 1888 invention was small (6in x 3in x 3in), needed no tripod and contained enough paper film for around 100 shots. When the roll was finished, there was no messing around with chemicals. All the photographer had to do was send it back to Eastman laboratories where it would be refilled and returned with a set of finished prints.
By 1891, snap-happy tourists were cluttering the landscape, straining sinews or muddying their frock-coats in an attempt to fit Mount Washington into frame or do justice to the Grand Canyon's grandeur. "In my various wanderings, I have met the gentleman with the black leather-covered box everywhere," the correspondent of the Photographic News Almanac reported. "Where the American tourists swarm, the Kodak seems as necessary a part of their belongings as the portmanteau."
The camera manufacturer's slogan was: "You press the button, we do the rest!" We did and we haven't stopped pressing yet.
Eastman lived until 1932, long enough to realise how he had changed the way we live (even at the height of the great depression there were 1.5 million camera-owners in metropolitan New York). But you still wonder whether, looking down from the great dark-room in the sky, he might register a flicker of puzzlement, and maybe a smile, at Sam Holden's photographs.
Holden, who has recently had work bought by the National Gallery in London, lurks in Barcelona's Parc Guell, outside Buckingham Palace or at Granada's Alhambra. He's blind to the visitor attractions. Instead he turns his lens on the tourists themselves, catching them unawares as they attempt to take the perfect snap.
What (Eastman might ask) is this strange ritual that Holden's chronicling? In 1891, tracts of the US were still barely explored and television wasn't even a twinkle in the three-year-old John Logie Baird's eye. The simplest snap, passed around back home, had the possibility to offer a thrill of discovery: "So that's what the sea/ the White House/ the New York skyline looks like. Now I know." But what new insights can the men and women in Holden's work hope to find in yet another picture of a place that has been recorded thousands, perhaps millions of times?