''Sightseeing'' is the culmination of seven months living in Valencia, Spain, carrying a camera wherever I wondered. This is an ethnographically based body of work drawing on my studies in biological anthropology. The camera is carried both to record personal experience and, more importantly,
to document and gain an understanding of the language and culture in which I was immersed. The ethnographic eye strives to see as the subject sees, devoid of ethnocentricity - without preconceptions, judgment, or ideas tainted by one’s own cultural context.

Through this piece I am attempting to explore the traveler’s search for “authenticity” in a diverse, complicated and foreign world. One motivation for traveling is to gain experience and to understand something new about the world. Tourism draws on and changes this idea, marketing a fantastical paradise version of real destinations. Through carrying out my own search for authenticity within Valencian life and accross Europe, it was evident that ‘authenticity’ itself is just a concept. (THEORISTS) Any experience is overlaid and overlapped with dozens of cultural and psychological filters, and no culture remains unchangeable or untouched. Globalisation has only served to emphasise this. The ‘authentic’, or pure, experience does not exist.

Very early on in my travels I realised that any study of this nature would ultimately revolve around two opposing themes: the universal versus the specific.  Documentary photography, exemplified by The Family of Man exhibition, normally seeks the universal. Responding to this tradition I originally saught out the universals, what is common between myself and my new friends and neighbours. I asked myself, what is fundamental to human nature? However throughout my exchange I discovered that the specific is equally important in gaining insight into any cultural context. Just as I can seek out sweeping aspects of humanity, we must understand that, although culture is not a closed system, any insight gained into one is ultimately unique to that space and time.

Photography as a medium encapsulates both of these seemingly opposed ideas. Each photograph is entirely specific to that fraction of a second in which the shutter is opened, but also is universal in that all photographs are simply recorded patterns of light.

The presentation of ‘Sightseeing’ is designed to communicate both the physical and conceptual voyages undertaken. Images are not grouped according to time or place, instead they are linked by underlying themes, such as the tourist’s agressive gaze, development and destruction, moments of surreality, light, colour and cats. The layout is designed as prose, in which all elements are carefully brought together to create a narrative.

 
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