Incidental tourists: Vernacular photo-travel books, 1900--1940.

摘要

Between 1900 and 1940 a new genre of travel books emerged. These books were comprised of first-person narratives written by middle-class tourists and illustrated with their own snapshot photographs. This dissertation offers a history of American vernacular photo-travel books in view of the democratic potential of the photographic medium and the uses to which it was put in the early twentieth century. By critically analyzing a body of photographic production that usually falls outside of the scope of art historical study, in this case, tourist photography, I aim to challenge traditional assumptions and biases within the discipline of art history concerning the historical value of amateur photography, as well as show the relevance of conceptual concerns from the disciplines of anthropology, cultural studies, and tourism studies to art history.;I define, and make a case for, the genre of vernacular photo-travel books in the preface, and then go on to describe, in the introduction, the social and historical context from which these books emerged and also situate this dissertation in relation to previous scholarship. Chapter One analyzes the relationship between mass-produced vernacular-photo travel books and photographically-illustrated travel books that were published on a small scale as well as private travel albums illustrated by commercial prints and snapshots. I claim that tourists used snapshot photography as a means to individualize the collective, and often standardized, experience of mass tourism. Chapter Two examines how amateur photography, and travel photography in particular, was marketed to the American public and how vernacular photo-travel books participated in American consumer culture and helped to perpetuate a cycle of touristic consumption. Chapter Three claims that some of these books were influenced by attitudes and visual conventions borrowed from ethnography. Chapter Four examines how women writers attempted to push social boundaries or gain some measure of social independence in their travels to foreign countries, while consistently demonstrating the difficulty of over-stepping the boundaries of their own cultural training. Finally, I conclude by considering the problems and possibilities for further studies of this kind.