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 2/2
And why do most of them seem so gripped by anxiety - brows furrowed, teeth gritted or mouths agape with concentration? They're meant to on holiday; it ought to be enjoyable. Instead, a man in a baseball in front of a green umbrella strikes a tai-chi pose, trousers straining with the effort of bracing himself. A cross-legged woman points her camera at the ceiling, looking as if she is about to enter a yogic trance.
Two guys in pale shirts frame their shots with the intensity of snipers fixing their sights on a target.
True, the suited figure crouching in front of Buckingham Palace (a businessman abroad with a day to kill, perhaps) attempts to crack a smile, but that's only because he is taking his own portrait. And even he doesn't look relaxed. It's a serious business letting the folks back home know you're having fun.
Some of Holden's portraits are prosaic, others verge on the comic. All of them, though, pose the same question: what are we trying to achieve when, as tourists, we whip out our cameras? That may not be as simple to answer as it first sounds. In her influential book On Photography, the late Susan Sontag saw not only acquisitiveness in the desire to snap ("To collect photographs is to collect the world") but also displacement. "The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are most likely to be exacerbated by travel."
In other words, if you can put it on film you can keep it under control. For workers freed from their familiar routine - so this argument continues - vacation photography offers a kind of surrogate job, providing a guilt-relieving sense of purpose. Is it a coincidence that the ferocious Japanese work ethic should be matched by a national obsession to experience life through a lens? You may not buy any of these arguments but something has to explain the grimaces and contortions that Holden's subjects put themselves through in an attempt to find a novel camera angle.
The quest to find something original in such well-trodden locations may be futile but it is also endearing. There is something very human about the need to prove you were there in the flesh, the refusal to give in and buy the mass-produced postcard.
I just hope that when they took their holiday snaps into the office, someone appreciated the effort.