From Antarctica to the Silk Road: More From the New York Times ‘Photography Issue’
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 06.12.07 | 2:18 PM ET
Howard W. French’s slide show and essay on Shanghai’s old quarters, which we recently posted about, isn’t the only piece in Sunday’s New York Times travel section worthy of note. The “Photography Issue” features several sharp audio slide shows, including Jehad Nga’s look at the Silk Road and Heidi Schumann’s tale of following in Ernest Shackleton’s wake in Antarctica, as well as a compelling essay by Richard B. Woodward about the intertwined history of photography and travel.
Woodward writes:
Photographers are major purveyors of fantasies, realistic as well as far-fetched, and as such have been crucial to the industry’s growth. Vivid as word pictures of the Great Wall of China can be, they don’t wow a reader as instantly as a photograph of its pythonic length and girth can transport a viewer. Without enticing images of turquoise waters and ivory sands, the Caribbean would probably be empty of vacationers. The idea of the seaside as a happy destination, a place to shed clothes, worries and inhibitions, is a modern invention, implanted in our heads by photographs and movies. It’s no coincidence that the advent of mass tourism, with Thomas Cook’s tours in the 1840s, dates to the popularity of the steamship, the railroad and the camera.
The next frontier for travel photographers? Space.
Related on World Hum:
* Is Times Square Turning Tourists’ Photos into Viral Ads?
* ‘Welcome to Pyongyang’: The City in Photos
* Saudi Arabia Lifts Photo Ban for Tourists
Photo by Neil Armstrong, NASA.
Email to friend
Twitter
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Mixx
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! Buzz
Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
