Incidental Tourists : Vernacular Photo-Travel Books, 1900-1940

Abstract : /
"Betwëen 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
smal! 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 overstepping
the boundaries of their own cultural training. Finally, I conclude by considering
the problems and possibilities for further studies of this kind."