The Whole World
Will they kill travel writing? Will they kill photographs?
The Faces of Laos by George Archer
Travel books and photobooks serve a similar purpose, in a way. When done well, they’re not just informative. They are transporting. If I wanted to know about Cameroon, I could read some misleading tables compiled by the central government, the IMF or the UN. I could let myself be lied to with statistics.
I could read an official history and solve my sleep problems for some time.
Or, if I wanted a historical run-up, if I wanted some ecological flavour, I could read Gerald Durrell’s stories about trekking through the Bafut region. I could learn in this way about the fauna, about what would bite and scratch, what was poisonous and what was docile. Which animals of the land and birds of the sky seemed most bizarre, most otherworldly, most beautiful.
Travel literature — and photography in the course of travel — seems always apt to be disdained, these days. Always each hovers near an edge, about to be consigned by the self-righteous, the academic, into the metaphorical ash can. And as we know, people are reading less than ever. They get their travel content from short-form videos and YouTube documentaries fronted by pretty or annoying or mentally ill people. Photography is for Instagram picture dumps at the end of the month or the season, not for reproducing between hard covers.
Some in the nineteenth century thought photography a wondrous, dangerous invention — not least because, in their minds, it might capture actions, characteristics, profiles with something like objectivity. This was a misapprehension of what the technology represents. Photography is never objective. It is profoundly more art than science.
What is the future, then, for these two unobjective, biased genres? These days well-paid people worry immensely about mis- and disinformation. They’re sophisticated enough to say that these things are insidious: propagated through means other than AI generation and out-and-out lying. Instead, it’s the slant they fear: the supposedly non-objective slant imparted by the wrong messengers that the critics dislike. Dislike and wish to see tamped down or controlled.
Photography, ethnography, travel writing — all these genres may find themselves within the gunsights of the spotters of misinformation. Perhaps Gerald Durrell’s comic stories convey too much of an exaggerated essence and not enough fact. Photography’s no better. Pictures of real events — just like your own eyes — can capture and transmit the disinformation, you see.
Perhaps photojournalism is such a misinformation problem it must be prevented and punished by double-tap aerial attack. And people who write books about countries they weren’t born in should be tortured on the rack for their impertinence and insensitivity.
Meanwhile, many people — possibly even most — love the home-brew kind of misinformation. They actively enjoy being lied to, provided they can retransmit the lies themselves and assimilate them into complex, incoherent worldviews assembled in their very own heads and occasionally argued about on occasion.
Where, precisely, does the truth — a non-objective, non-clinical, un-programmatic truth — surface in all of this? Where might it go?
It might have nowhere, no audience, no future at all.
But there’s hope. For travel writing, for photobooks, for the whole show that must stay on the road. What we may, if we are all very lucky, want is something different again from the above. What we may want from them is a perspective: a point of view. And nothing more.
We want stories that tell of the whole. Or, in direct contrast, of one simple unrepeated, unrelated eccentricity. We don’t want fabulists — but what we want, within reason, are artists.
Artistry becomes all the more potent in far retrospect. We do not want our photojournalism from fifty years before to be a list. We don’t want objectivity. Fie the paper version of a TikTok ‘ten facts you did not know about French Indochina — number nine shocked me’ short.
What we want to see are aspects. We want to see scenes from life. What we all want to see, to be moved by, to find fellow feeling with, are faces — faces from the past. Faces from ten thousand miles away.
George Archer’s book of pictures of Laos was produced in the 1970s. It is significantly affected by the wars that affected the country and its neighbours for the surrounding years. As Archer writes in his introduction, he pictures mostly old and very young people, because everyone else is not available — such is the burden of work, the burden of the war — to be photographed.
But what he delivers are faces. The face, mostly obscured by cloth, of a tiny baby asleep in its grandmother’s arms. The infant dressed in something colourful and local, sat on a brother’s or cousin’s lap — completely conquering the frame — stealing the eye, stealing the attention, even insisting upon being the only thing in the shot in focus. The old men and women smiling so hard you can see all their teeth, or the places where the teeth once were, smiling so hard their faces are each a bird’s nest of wrinkles. The shrunken hands, the intriguing but fading clothes. The poor dwellings. Many children lined up in a row. The lack of shoes. The whole world.