In early May of 1732, a twenty-five year old Swedish botanist by the name of Carl Linnaeus rode out from the university town of Uppsala on a journey northbound to Lapland, the largest province in Sweden.  Countless observations filled his travel journal – changing soil conditions, vegetation in the ditches and meadows, descriptions of song birds and proportions of fir trees – amongst other details within the landscape.  It was not a poetic text and thus far different from the travel writings of Carl Jonas Linnerhielm, in his account of a voyage through the same landscape a half of a century later.  Linnerhielm was not out to collect minerals or flowers; instead, he collected views and moods, and his descriptions of the landscape included a constant ranking of aesthetic values. 

(Leaf forms from 'Hortus Cliffortianus')

Linnaeus and Linnerhielm were traveling through the same landscape, in 1732 and 1787, yet their motivations and observations were extremely different.  Linnerhielm would continue to travel, which resulted in published books filled with sketches and descriptions of his travel.  In the foreword of his books he would publish the text, “I travel to see, not to study.”  Both of these Swedish figures have long lasting legacies, with Carl Linnaeus continuing his collection of data for many years and inspiring many like minded 'apostles' to do the same, and Jonas Linnerhielm being touted as the first proper tourist in Sweden, publishing creative travel writings and traveling for pleasure and nothing else. 

It is no surprise that tourism and photography both came into popular culture at around the same time.  With the rise of the middle class and an increase in expendable income, many people began to discover the joys of travel and photography and the two have become nearly inseparable since. 

But photography and travel share an even more important link within the history of photography – particularly during the time before either was truly an accessible activity for the general public.  Early photographic pioneers would journey to far away places with slow cameras, requiring light-tight tents to be erected at the scenes they wished to photograph.  The photographer would then have to paint the emulsion onto glass plates and develop the image immediately with a variety of chemicals (hoping that nothing went wrong during this complicated process).  The images they took, often of places inaccessible to the masses, would later be sold as exciting and exotic locations that most people would never get the chance to see for themselves. 

(An example of a wet plate dark tent, used in the 1860's during expeditions)

This practice would continue to expand as travel became more affordable.  When sightseeing in wheeled vehicles became possible at Yosemite in 1874, views of the most exciting features of the park were already on sale.  In Scotland from the 1860’s, a man by the name of James Valentine began purveying views of tourist sites to the British middle and upper classes, and would soon become one of the world’s largest manufacturers of postcards.  In Italy, the Alinari brothers in Florence and Naya in Venice distinguished themselves amongst the country’s countless 19th century view specialists. Sights and views became a big business.  Not only would postcards serve as a convenient knick-knacks for tourists to either collect or send away to family and friends, but they would also work to inspire desire to visit these places by representing them in their idealized forms.

(A colour printed postcard of Yosemite Valley from 1901)

Although some amateurs traveled with cameras long before photography was easy, the advent of roll-film made it much simpler, cheaper and more commonplace. It also came just in time for the bicycle boom of the 1890s, and by c.1900, bicycle (and, more gradually, automobile) tours were featured in many a snapshot album. Hotels also responded to the surge of self-propelled amateurs by offering darkroom facilities as part of their amenities.

Early tourist snapshots often resembled the professional compositions long available for sale, but the shift from buying photographs to making them gradually made photography a major component of the tourist day, both as a pastime and a means to infiltrate, occupy, understand, and control the unfamiliar place. In the early 21st century, against the background of mass tourism's vast expansion since 1945, photographers were often given signposts to the best vantage point for a successful picture; events and performances were structured for photography (and may have even been sponsored by camera manufacturers); film cartons littered popular sites; and organizers of ‘camera safaris’ and photographic workshops in scenic locations advertised photograph taking as the rationale for the trip.

Today, photographs still promote tourism when they appear in newspaper and magazine advertisements, in brochures, on billboards, railway stations, websites, and in television commercials. They often serve the same purpose in feature stories, informational travelogues, calendars, coffee-table books, museum exhibitions, and the like. They are usually idealized, and reduced to a few widely recognized signifiers, such as a palm-fringed beach, Big Ben, the Taj Mahal, a gondola, or perhaps a sombrero. 

Much has changed technologically since Jonas Linnerhielm traversed the Swedish countryside in search of collecting idealized views, however, the modern day tourist has carried on his intentions and motivations quite faithfully and the goal of the tourist has remained essentially unchanged.  When tourists return home, their photographs become complex mementoes, evidence of a journey that condenses a multifaceted experience into sets of discrete rectangles to be sorted, shared, and organized into an idealized narrative. As in the 19th century, some narratives may take the form of carefully edited and captioned holiday albums. Many more pictures will remain structure less and loose in shoeboxes or envelopes or, unprinted, on CD-Rs, doomed to be forgotten or discarded.

Other photographs, however, in one of the most radical changes within the very nature of the photographic image, will take on a life of their own.