A short history of early travel photography - About emperors, preachers and ham sandwiches

But with his next train of thought he gave photography a significant boost: bitterly disappointed by his drawing skills, Talbot wanted to find a method which would “permanently replicate the image and keep it on paper perpetually”. Two years later, he was successful in this: the development of the negative-positive procedure made it possible (in contrast to the daguerreotype) to reproduce pictures by printing them from negatives.

From this moment onwards, photographic procedures continued to improve. The albumen procedure became prevalent, the wet collodion plate was invented and the required exposure times were drastically reduced by these new technologies. Unfortunately, the equipment was anything but suitable for travelling. It was very heavy, sometimes chickens had to be taken along (as a source of egg white for developing pictures) and the chemicals used were so dangerous that some photographers even blew themselves up along the way.

How the alcohol consumption of English people led to the invention of package tourism…

The spreading out of package tourism in the middle of the 19th century was not inconsiderable in helping along the invention of travel photography. And religion, for its part, was also to have a considerable part in inventing package tourism. It was namely the English lay preacher and staunch teetotaller Thomas Cook (1808-1892) who made it posssible for more than 500 people to make their way from Leicester to Loughborough in July 1841, in the sense of on their way to God – sober.

Before this, Cook had travelled through England as an itinerant preacher for a year and had found out that religious faith was only used as an opiate for the masses to a limited extent. Alcohol, on the other hand, was much more popular. A joke at that time, when the working population only had Sundays free at most to go on trips, referred exactly to this: how can you get out of Manchester cheaply? By getting drunk. Cook wanted to change this by offering trips by train which were just as cheap as a visit to the pub – including tea, ham sandwiches and music.

… and how the journeys of Emperor Wilhelm II led to the invention of the cruise

Emperor Wilhelm II (1859-1941), also known and mocked as the “travelling emperor”, travelled on his yacht “Hohenzollern” to Norway many times from 1889 onwards. And there were always photographers with him, who documented the imperial family’s holidays and who subsequently published the photographs back in the home country. These travelling impressions roused touristic desires in the financially better-situated middle classes and the nobility: they, too, wanted to travel to Nordland and Spitzbergen and walk in the footsteps of the emperor.

Albert Ballin, the head of the Hamburg shipping company Hapag (Hamburg-Amerikanische-Packetfahrt-Actien-Gesellschaft), founded in 1847, sensed a big business opportunity and, without further ado, invented the cruise trip. The increased demand for travel by the privileged population was, however, not the only reason. Ships in regular shipping services were not used to full capacity in the winter months, which led to a loss of profits in an already competitive industry. So Ballin decided to offer a pleasure trip at this time, known today as a cruise.

The first cruise by Hapag took place on the “Augusta Victoria” from Cuxhaven to the Mediterranean with 241 guests on board from January to March 1891. Even Emperor Wilhelm II came to see the ship on the day of its departure. It called at Gibraltar and Genoa, Alexandria, Jaffa, Beirut, Constantinople and many other places. Excursion programmes to Cairo or Jerusalem and Damsacus were offered there where the “Augusta Victoria” made a longer stop. Three years later, the ship’s first “Nordland trip” then took place, from Hamburg to Spitzbergen. The photographers were also on board here.

Large-scale photo books which used the photographs as a memento for the tourists who had been on the trip, for example “Die Nordlandfahrt der Auguste-Victoria” (“The Nordland trip of the Augusta Victoria”), were made on returning to the respective home ports. These travel albums came into their heyday from 1890 onwards. Gisela Parak from the Deutsches Schifffahrtsmuseum (DSM – German Maritime Museum) in Bremen says about this: “The medialisation of the world began by tracing the routes of the cruises”.

One technology and its impact

In addition to the emrgence of mass tourism, the rapid development of the technical components of photography was now decisive for the incipient flood of photos: from the daguerreotype invented in 1839 which only produced unique copies, to Talbot’s positive-negative procedure where reproductions could be made, replaced by the wet collodion procedure in 1851 which drastically reduced the exposure time, up to the breakthough in 1878 with the invention of the gelantin dry plate, the application of which also made snapshots possible. If the equipment around 1870 had been so heavy that several camels were necessary to transport it on a journey into the desert (respectively, other appropriate options for other destinations), then the “handheld camera” (such as the Kodak No: 1) made the simple photographic documentation of their travels possible, not only for the technically knowledgeable individual , but also for the many from around 1890.

The photographs originating from this time were perceived as actual depcitions of reality. They were regarded as scientific inventories, as objective contemporary documents. The intital recipients were, at first, not aware of the individuality and subjectivity of the photographic view, which changes, reduces and alienates that which is depicted.

Early photographs developed, however, a power in their own time which gave some indication of the political and societal influence which the medium of photography would have in the future. Thus, the photographer William Henry Jackson travelled through the Yellowstone region in 1871 by order of the US Congress. The photos he brought back with him impressed the parliamentarians so much that in 1872 they decided to found the world’s first national park, known today as the Yellowstone National Park.

This positive example for the influence of photography on political events is opposed , however, by a large number of negative examples. Because it was possible to travel to and take photographs in regions also far away fom Europe, photographs came back which served to justify and legitimise colonialism, among other things.

In 1957 the Italian author Italo Calvino wrote:“Perhaps true, total photography is […] a heap of fragments of private photos in front of a crumpled background of devastation and coronations.”

Most travel photographers today no longer have to worry about heavy equipment, taking chickens with them or exploding chemicals. They carry their camera in their trouser pocket, the photographs do not need egg white for developing and their pictures are immediately published digitally as they like. The medium has become more democratic; the world is seen through the views of many.