Why We All Take the Same Travel Photos

为什么我们要去拍同样的旅行照片

作者: LAURA MALLONEE

2018年12月10日 Wired美国连线杂志

With 7.4 million people crammed into its 426 square miles, Hong Kong can be overwhelming to tourists. But now an app tells you exactly what to see—or, more precisely, what to photograph.

占地426平方英里的香港拥有740万人口，对游客来说，香港可能过于拥挤。但是现在有一个应用程序可以准确地告诉你应该看什么ー或者更准确地说，应该拍什么。

[copy]Scroll through Explorest to find a surfeit of futuristic high-rises, minimalist staircases, and rooftop views perfect for selfies. Clicking on the pic tells you how to capture it—not only the GPS coordinates for where to plant your feet, but also the exact settings to punch into your camera (in the unlikely event it’s not a smartphone).

在应用Explorest 里划动可以找到大量未来风高楼大厦、极简抽象派楼梯和屋顶景观，非常适合自拍，点击图片就会告诉你如何捕捉它ー不仅指导你按 GPS 坐标站位，还告诉你相机的精确设置(如果不是智能手机的话)。

“Two of the most common questions asked on social media are ‘Where was this picture taken?’ and ‘How do I get there?'” says CEO Justin Meyers. “We want to make traveling a more seamless, cultural experience using an extensive database of local knowledge.”

"在社交媒体上，人们最常问的两个问题是'这张照片在哪儿拍的?' '我怎么去那里?"' 首席执行官贾斯汀迈耶斯说， "我们希望利用丰富的本地知识数据库，让旅行成为一种更加无缝的文化体验。"

But Explorest is just an app-shaped version of something tourists already do: flit from attraction to attraction to take the same photos they’ve already seen of Buckingham Palace, the Golden Gate Bridge or even Brussels’ Peeing Boy. That script, staged again and again by countless visitors, reflects how photography has always shaped the travel experience—for good or bad.

但 Explorest 只是把游客们已经做过的事情反映到应用程序里: 从一个景点到另一个景点，拍摄他们已经看过的白金汉宫公园、金门大桥甚至布鲁塞尔的撒尿男孩的照片，这个由无数游客一次又一次上演的剧本，反映了摄影对旅游体验的影响——无论好坏。[/copy]

“It can be an opening up to the world,” says Peter D. Osborne, the author of Photography and the Contemporary Cultural Condition, “or it can be forcing the world into your frame—as it were, almost literally.”

《摄影与当代文化状况》一书的作者彼得• D •奥斯本表示，"它可以说是打开了世界，也可以说是将世界塞到你的取景框中ー就是字面上的意思。"

The standardization of travel all started in the 18th century, as guidebooks began directing visitors to “picturesque” views that looked like paintings. They recorded them with the gadgets of the day: Claude glasses reflected tinted, fisheye scenes that were easy to sketch, while Camera Lucidas actually transposed them onto the page. Nifty as those tools were, they couldn’t hold their own against the daguerreotype, a heavy wooden box camera introduced in 1839 that gentleman travelers soon began lugging to Greece and Egypt. But the early technology was still too cumbersome and time-consuming for most people, who just bought postcards.

旅游的标准化始于18世纪，因为旅游指南开始引导游客去“描摹”那些如画的美景，他们用当时的小工具将这些景色记录下来: 克洛德玻璃用来反射出有色的鱼眼镜头场景，易于绘制，而投影描绘器实际上将这些场景转投到画纸上。虽然这些工具很漂亮，但是他们无法抵挡银版照相术-1839年发明的一种重型木箱式照相机，绅士们很快就开始拖着它来到希腊和埃及，但对于大多数刚刚购买了明信片的人（指游客）来说，这种早期的技术仍然太过繁琐和耗时。

Until Kodak. The introduction of George Eastman’s lightweight, foolproof camera in 1888 meant hordes of tourists could quickly press a button to capture their individual experiences … which turned out to be more or less identical.

直到柯达出现，1888年乔治伊斯曼推出的这款轻巧、简单的相机意味着大批游客可以迅速按下按钮，捕捉他们各自的体验... 虽然事实证明，这些体验或多或少是相同的。

[copy]That’s because photographs actually created the attractions in the first place. As sociologist Dean MacCannell observed in his 1976 book The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, images lift unknown landscapes from obscurity, marking them as significant and “setting the tourist in motion on his journey to find the true object.”

这是因为起初照片确实创造了吸引人去的景点，正如社会学家迪安马卡内尔在他1976年的著作《旅行者: 休闲阶层的新理论》一书中所说，照片将未知的风景从默默无闻中提升出来，使之变得有名，并"促使游客行动起来在旅途中寻找真正的美景。”

When you found it, you snapped a pic to prove it—a circular ritual John Urry describes in his 2002 book The Tourist Gaze. “What is sought for in a holiday is a set of photography images, which have already been seen in tour company brochures or on TV programmes,” he wrote. “[It] ends up with travellers demonstrating that they really have been there by showing their version of the images that they had seen before they set off.”

当你找到它的时候，你会拍一张照片来证明ーー约翰厄里在他2002年的著作《游客的凝视》中描述了一种循环。" 度假时人们想要的是一组照片，虽然这些照片已经出现在旅游公司的宣传册或电视节目中，"他写道， "(它)最终以旅行者通过展示他们在出发前看到的图像来证明他们确实到过那里。"

It’s less about seeing the place than taking the same photo as everyone else. At the Grand Canyon in the 1970s, Osborne saw a group of tourists lining up to snap pictures at a spot specially marked for doing so. “People were queuing up, quite politely, waiting their turns,” Osborne says. “I thought, Why don’t they just spread out three or four meters on either side?”

与其说是为了看到这个地方，不如说是为了和其他人拍同一张照片。上世纪70年代，奥斯本在大峡谷看到一群游客在专门划定的位置排队拍照，"人们很有礼貌地排起了长队，等待着轮到他们。"奥斯本说，"我想,他们为什么不分散在两边三四米的地方（拍照）呢?"[/copy]

That lemming-like practice didn’t change much with the democratization of tourism in the late 20th century, or even with the explosion of digital photography and social media in the 21st. Now there are more tourists than ever, more trips than ever, and more lookalike photographs than ever. They still depict the same definitive sites set out long ago in travel books, but as these attractions have become ordinary, the ordinary has also become the attraction. Your smartphone lets you snap an unlimited stream of Airbnbs, infinity pools and urban art—all of which you probably first saw on Instagram.

随着20世纪末旅游业的民主化，甚至随着21世纪数码照相和社交媒体的爆发，这种旅鼠式的做法也没有多大改变。现在游客比以往任何时候都多，旅行也比以往任何时候都多，拍的照片也比以往任何时候都多，他们仍然描绘着很久以前旅游书中描绘的那些知名景点，但是随着这些景点变得普通，原先普通的景点又变成了吸引人去的地方。你的智能手机可以让你一次又一次地去拍民宿、无边界泳池和城市艺术—所有这些可能都是你在Instagram看过的。

It’s tough to break out of that cycle. I knew it was silly to join the crowd of tourists clicking away at the Mona Lisa when I visited the Louvre a couple years ago—geotagging has made it all too clear how unoriginal those photos are. But I did it anyway, elbowing through a sea of smartphones and selfie sticks for a tourist-free shot at the front. The visit just didn’t feel complete without it. But why?

很难打破这个循环，几年前，当我参观卢浮宫时，我知道加入一群在蒙娜丽莎边上拍照的游客有点傻—位置标签使得这些照片显得如此没有创意，但我还是这么做了，我用手机和自拍杆在一片人海中挤来挤去，只为了在前面拍一张没有游客的照片。没有它，这次访问就感觉不完整。但是为什么呢？

Because photographing something is a way of possessing it—at least, that’s what the critic Susan Sontag argued in her 1977 classic, On Photography. “To collect photographs is to collect the world,” she wrote. It confirms your connection to places and objects once distant and remote, making the world slightly smaller and less alienating.

因为拍摄某种东西是拥有它的一种方式—至少，这是评论家苏珊桑塔格在她1977年的经典作品《论摄影》中的观点，“收集照片就是收集世界，”她写道。它确认了你与那些曾经遥远遥远的地方和物体的联系，让这个世界变得更小，也减少了疏远。

Ironically, though, “collecting the world” might mean also losing it. “A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir,” Sontag wrote.

然而讽刺的是,"收集世界"可能也意味着失去它，桑塔格写道，"拍照是证明体验的一种方式，也是错过体验的一种方式ー通过将体验局限于寻找照片，通过将体验转化为图像、纪念品。"

[copy]Some recent studies support that idea. One suggested that taking a photo of something makes it harder to remember it. Another found museum-goers were less likely to remember objects if they took photos. And yet, photography is an impartial technology like any other.

最近的一些研究支持了这一观点，有人认为，给物品拍照会使它更难记住，还有人发现，去博物馆的人在拍照时不太可能记住展品。当然，和其他任何技术一样，摄影作为一项技术是公正的。

Maybe the problem is less with the tool than with how it’s used. Most tourists will never be explorers in the traditional sense of the word, but you can still engage with what’s in front of you in a serious way—and the camera, and maybe even apps like Explorest, can help you do that. Jonas Larsen, professor of mobility at Roskilde University, has studied tourist behavior at attractions in Denmark. While some were hurriedly snapping away, others were taking their time, carefully studying their environment between snaps. “Rather than being reduced to something superficial, it can actually open you up to a more sustained kind of experience,” he says.

也许问题不在于工具本身，而在于如何使用它。大多数游客永远不会成为传统意义上的探险者，但你仍然可以认真对待眼前的事物ー相机，甚至像 Exploest 这样的应用程序都可以帮助你做到这一点，罗斯基勒大学流动学教授 Jonas Larsen 研究了丹麦景点的游客行为，有些人拍完照就会匆匆忙忙地离去，另一些人则会在拍照间隙慢悠悠地体验周边的美景，他说，"这样拍照就不仅不会让你变得肤浅，反而会给你一种更持久的体验。"。

That feels true. During a high school trip to Italy, I lagged behind the group, stopping every few steps to take a photo with my Nikon film camera. It offered a way to look more deeply and express my delight at the details: walls overgrown with ivy, windows crowded with flower pots, a whitewashed monastery shining in the afternoon sun.

真是这样，在一次去意大利的高中旅行中，我落在大家的后面，每走几步就停下来用我的尼康相机拍一张照片。它能让我更深入地观察美景，更好地表达旅途中我偏爱的细节: 爬满常春藤的墙壁，挤满花盆的窗户，刷着白墙的修道院在午后的阳光下闪闪发光。[/copy]

I wasn’t merely collecting shots of the world I’d already seen. I was soaking them in.

我不仅仅是在拍摄那些看过的美景，我也在享受那些美景。

【龙腾网】为什么我们要去拍同样的旅行照片!