Tourism and American Identity: Kodak's Conspicuous Consumers Abroad

In the United States, from roughly 1890 to 1930, snapshot photography and mass tourism came into being during a transformative flowering of consumer culture defined by the mass production of inexpensive-standardized goods and an unprecedented growth of the middle class. Newly accessible commodities, amateur-friendly cameras, and travel affected people's sense of identity and place within the social structure. Travel was seen as a marker of upward mobility, and American consumers made travel photographs with the hope that they could turn their intangible experiences and memories into physical objects that could be owned, collected, and displayed to others as proof of their prowess as consumers. American camera manufacturers, most notably the Eastman Kodak Company, integrally linked travel and photography as modes of conspicuous consumption in their advertising campaigns. Their efforts to promote travel photography as a means to display individual Americans's new found social and economic power were facilitated by a socio-historical context in which travel and photography were also read as signifiers of the United States' increasingly important political and economic role in the world. This article explores how American consumerism, patriotism, and imperialism worked in concert as three indelible influences upon the first forty years of amateur tourist photography. Photography and the Commodification of Experience Even though the invention of photography was first announced to the public in 1839, those who could afford to travel in the nineteenth century usually purchased photographic souvenirs from commercial vendors and did not take their own photographs, because early cameras were expensive, cumbersome, and complicated. By 1900, however, cameras like the Kodak Brownie were becoming relatively inexpensive, portable, and automated, and most tourists started taking pictures for themselves. In his book The Tourist Gaze (2002), John Urry makes the connection between travel photography and the desire to own when he argues that "travel is a strategy for the accumulation of photographs and hence for the commodification and privatization of personal and especially of family memories" (128-29). Peter Osborne argues that photography's invention answered several social needs, including the desire to display one's possessions to others. Specifically, he suggests that photographic technology appealed to middle-class tourists because they already "looked on the world as a department-store without-walls" (Osborne 90). The photographic medium, he argues, further encouraged middleclass tourists to see the world as "spread out before the observer, separate from the mind but available for intellectual, aesthetic and economic possession" (Osborne 8). Osborne even goes so far as to suggest, "to photograph is to in some way to appropriate the object being photographed" (90). Taking a photograph does not mean that one literally owns the thing it shows; the association between photography and ownership must be understood on a phenomenological level. As Osborne explains, "true consumption (takes) place in the eye and imagination" (127). Considering the mentality of consumption driving mass tourism forward, one of the most important functions of travel photography was that it transformed abstract and intangible experiences into tangible material objects that could be collected and owned. Photography helped tourists materialize the more abstract aspects of mass tourism, providing a way to preserve and externalize memories as well as manifest a particular self-image of oneself as a consumer. On a larger cultural scale, travel photography greatly contributed to a cycle of travel-related consumption. Photography, as a medium capable of mass reproduction, allowed innumerable images of canonical tourist sites to enter into the public sphere where they had a standardizing influence upon people's decisions about where to go and what to see (MacCannell 14, 41). …