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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  New Year Ideas | Travel without a camera
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New Year Ideas | Travel without a camera

A camera-driven holiday will necessarily be one devoted to the collection of surfacesit comes at a cost

Venus de Milo on display at The Louvre in Paris. Photo: G SampathPremium
Venus de Milo on display at The Louvre in Paris. Photo: G Sampath

For most of human history, people travelled without a camera. The world’s greatest travellers did not take photographs. Marco Polo did not take a selfie on top of the Great Wall of China. Nor did Hiuen Tsang snap himself with the Nalanda varsity’s volleyball team.

But today, the camera has virtually taken over the experience of leisure travel. The moment of truth came for me during a recent trip to Paris, France. Despite my old temperamental hostility to the camera, I could not restrain myself from posing—feeling like an idiot the whole time—in front of the Eiffel Tower. Nor could I desist from shooting every sunset on sight. Or every gargoyle glowering at me from the rooftops of “Rue Breakez Votre Camera S’il Vous Plaît".

Things came to a head at the Louvre Museum where, after standing in queue for three hours and walking 2km through endless corridors, when I finally made it to Room No.6 on the first floor of the Denon wing for a rendezvous with the Mona Lisa, I could not see the picture for the cameras.

There must have been a hundred people in the room. All armed with shooting devices. Many had “stand-alone" cameras. Others held smart-phones. Some had both. And with their arms raised above the heads of each other, it looked like all these people had gathered to collectively surrender before La Gioconda. The reality, of course, was the opposite—an absurd attempt to make La Gioconda surrender to the camera.

When I got back from the trip, I discovered I had clicked about 2,200 photographs. Truth be told, every time I took a picture, I was repelled by what I was doing. But I did it anyway. Stronger than my revulsion was my desire to appropriate something of the present moment—so that I could revisit it, and perhaps access some part of this experience once again in my imagination.

Yet even as we try to squirrel away discrete parcels of reality in the form of image souvenirs, something is lost every time we take a picture. We can capture the surface, not what lies beneath, which is something that can only be accessed through consciousness, not light. A camera-driven holiday will necessarily be one devoted to the collection of surfaces. It comes at a cost—the objectification of reality and a consequent diminution of experience.

Surfaces are more than adequate for the social rites of Facebook. A more ambitious traveller, however, would want to experience and understand more than to see and remember. So I have resolved that my next travel project will not include a camera. As for recording memories, I’ll make do with notebook and pen. Just try it once.

G. Sampath is the author of How to Make Enemies And Offend People.

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Published: 04 Jan 2014, 12:36 AM IST
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