Two miners on a 1871 photo: tourists, gay, women?

Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the national-history museum of the Netherlands, is making an increasing number of its collection items available online. Online museum visits have a lot of benefits (next to some important downsides!). One of these is that one item can be shown in combination with many different items, and used in many different thematic exhibitions at the same time. The same photo of Amsterdam can, for instance, illustrate urban history and the history of photography.* Using this idea, one Rijksmuseum curator has assembled a ‘Queering the Rijksmuseum’ collection, in which works ranging from early printed books to modern jewellery are shown alongside each other.

One of the items is this picture from 1871:

Photo by Paul Ney, 21 July 1871. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, no. RP-F-F23327. Public domain. Accessed via Rijksmuseum

It was taken on a summer morning near a Bavarian salt mine: ‘Glück auf’ is a German miners’ greeting. According to the Rijksmuseum description, it shows two men, and we can see them carry what is probably a miner’s lamp. Are they two German miners in romantic embrace?

There are three noteworthy things about this photograph.

In the first place, of course, we see two men sitting very close together and looking comfortable. The picture reminded me of many of the photos in the recently published book Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love. And I agree with the Rijksmuseum curator that a case could certainly be made that the two people on the photo were intimately befriended. Check out the book if you want to compare notes: it is probably available in the Rijksmuseum library!

Second, that mine’s rocky facade looks suspiciously like papier-mâché. Also, the entrance is weirdly symmetric. And, most important of all, it would have been unusual for two miners in 1871, if they had the money to have a photo of themselves taken at all, to hire a photographer and pose with clean-scrubbed faces but still holding their miner’s lamp, in front of the entrance to their work. Much more likely, they would have arranged for a gentlemanly family portrait in their Sunday’s best, posing next to a Greek column or a vase. Or, if posing as miners, it would have been their employer who arranged for a photo to be taken of a group of workers, in order to promote their own enterprise.

You guessed it: the two figures are no miners at all, but tourists. According to the handwritten text on the photo they were ‘on the way to the Königssee’, a lake close to where the photo was taken. This text is in Dutch, so they had probably travelled from the Netherlands or Flanders, and were perhaps taking an Alpine trip of a few weeks.

What’s more, the photo itself was not taken in front of a mine, but in a photographer’s studio specialising in tourist snapshots. The studio was located close to an actual salt mine, but it was much more convenient to make these photographic souvenirs in front of a replica of the mine. We can only guess at whether the two tourists even saw the real mine in the first place. In many ways, tourism back then was already very much what it is like now.

Thirdly and finally, I wonder whether the mine is the only ‘fake’ on this photo. Here I enter the realm of speculation, I must add. But the picture does raise the question: were these tourists men at all? There is something in their oversized coats, the hat of the person on the right and the white pantaloons (with lobed edge) of the person on the right; something about their posture and the way they bear their head; the build of their shoulders, their face, and perhaps most of all the way their hair seems to be tied up – that suggests to me that they may have been female tourists masquerading as male miners.

There would not have been anything too remarkable in that: dressing up was a favourite middle-class pastime, and this occasionally included cross-gender-dressing. The moustache of the right-hand person, I must admit, would have been a bit more unusual to slap on. As I said, we are rummaging around here in the realm of the speculative. And of course there is a chance that instead, we see a feminine man or a masculine woman, with no sense of dressing up for the photo but a more enduring mixing of gender styles.

But the really remarkable thing, in case these really were two women, would be that they would be two women travelling together, possibly without men. Not unheard-of in the nineteenth century, but certainly less usual than all-male or mixed parties.** Which is of course what this couple could be as well: a ‘mixed party’.

Whichever way we bend it, all this confusion certainly makes this photo a valid example of a queer collection item in the Rijksmuseum.

Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850s-1950s, edited by Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell. 5 Continents Editions, 2020.

* A downside of this practice of siloing visitors according to their interests, is that people are challenged less to learn about new topics. The integration of important themes such as homophobia or slavery into permanent exhibitions that all visitors get to see, might work better here. Also see the reservations that have been expressed about the Rijksmuseum’s temporary exhibition on the history of Dutch slavery that is opening now. Fortunately, the Rijksmuseum has announced it is also incorporating information about slavery into their permanent display.

** See my forthcoming book on travel and space in the nineteenth century.

Britain sacked Britain

In my last post, just before I left on a short journey, I mentioned the financial support many regions in the UK receive from the EU. Unfortunately, on 23 June many of those same regions voted to leave the EU. One of them is the Isle of Anglesey in Wales. 51% of its voters wanted to leave the EU.

I happened to be on the Isle of Anglesey last week. As a tourist. Now tourism drives a major part of the Welsh economy: about 10% of jobs depend on it. A good reason to take care of the tourism sector, you might think. But the majority of Welsh voters decided otherwise. Looking for things to do on Anglesey last week, here are some of the things I found:

These leaflets have acquired a tragic note since 23 June. The blue flag with the yellow stars is ubiquitous, indicating support from everything from the European Fund for Rural Development to the European Fisheries Fund, and of course the Fund for Regional Development.

As I was turning the leaflet carousel, I imagined the shock that must have been felt in Wales on Friday the 24th with those people who spent sweat and tears to make these places happen. Which of them will we still be able to visit in three years’ time?

How to be a good tourist

Photo by Hans Olofsson, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, 2011, published on flickr.

The European holiday season has started, and, with it, the season of sight-seeing and snapshots.

On recent holidays, it struck me how many tourists take photos of famous monuments, of works of art or of landscapes, instead of looking at them.

This week, I came across a marvellous example. It was in an article on the Ghent Altarpiece, a famous set of religious paintings dating from the fifteenth century (local name Het Lam Gods, by Hubert and Jan van Eyck). Every year, thousands of visitors flock together in Ghent’s Saint Bavo Cathedral to see it. Or do they?

The altarpiece itself has been sitting in one of the chapels in the back of the church for the past few decades. (At the moment of writing, it is being treated for conservation elsewhere.) But immediately upon entering the church, visitors encounter a life-size copy of the work. It is this copy in front of which tourists linger the longest.

One wonders whether a certain confusion about possibly having reached their destination already plays a role here. Anyhow, according to the article I read, tourists stay with the reproduction longer than with the original because it is the version they are allowed to take photos of.

It is easy to be dismissive of this kind of behaviour, and perhaps with some ground, too: a photo taken of a painting will never be as good as either the original (which the photographer paid little attention to) or the professional reproductions (which they did not buy). The photographer missed their one opportunity to see a stunning work of art in its full size, its most flamboyant colours, its moving texture, and its original setting – in this case the very church it was designed for. From now on, it will only be a small rectangle on a screen again, or a pixelated print in an album.

Nevertheless, such dismissal also serves to emphasise status differences: who knows best how to enjoy art?

And anyway, it is more interesting to try and understand the photo tourist than to be annoyed by them. So: why might taking a photo be the most important thing to do for some when faced with a famous sight? So far, I have come across two important reasons:

1. Many people find it important to have some sort of evidence that they themselves have in actual fact been present at this or that famous location and seen the famous object. Especially an amateurish photo is probably an asset rather than a hindrance in providing such evidence.
2. Taking a photo is a way of engaging with a place. Because, okay, we have arrived in this church: now what? We’ve established the painting is there; now do we walk away again? Ah, we are supposed to look at it? Just stand and look? What is that, looking – what does one actually do? What I mean is that it may take an upbringing in a specific milieu to become comfortable with the kind of behaviour that museum curators, church sextons and other cultural hosts expect of their guests. Enjoying a static image can be hard. What do you do with your eyes, with your hands, and what should you be thinking about? Photography then becomes a way of knowing what to do with yourself.

I am curious to find out about other people’s experiences with (non-art) touristic photography.

In this nineteenth-century view on sixteenth-century church-going (so before the days of photography), the famous altarpiece does not command much direct attention either, which is odd in the nineteenth-century nationalist context of art-historical pride. Painting by Pierre François de Noter, ‘Het Lam Gods van de gebroeders van Eyck in de Sint Bavo te Gent’, 1829. Now in the Rijksmusem Amsterdam, SK-A-4264.

 

Want to know more about the interesting behaviour of tourists? Read Dean MacCannell, The Tourist (London, 1976).

The article on the Altarpiece appeared in a book on the collective memory of the Low Countries: Wessel Krul, ‘Het Lam Gods’, in Jo Tollebeek and Henk te Velde (ed.), Het geheugen van de Lage Landen (Rekkem, 2009), 172-9.

Greetings from a [insert weather] place!

It’s a holiday cliche.

‘We’re having a great time here and the weather is nice.’ Or: ‘rain every day since we arrived.’ Or: ‘even the locals complain about the heat.’

On our postcards home, we write about the weather.

And not just we. As I examine letters from a century or more ago for my work, I find the same preoccupations, the same themes, the same wordings.

Here is a postcard from 1905. It was sent by a father who had to be away from home for work and regularly reported to his daughter about his activities.

Postcard from a father to his daughter, sent in 1905, now in the collection of the Library of Congress.

On 14 August, he wrote:

The weather much cooler to day.

The same kind of texts can be found on postcards and in letters and diaries throughout the western world.

Now many scholars agree that such statements form a mere convention. Talk about the weather, as talk about hotels or sight-seeing, consists of cliches, slavishly repeated from existing models. Travel writing, in their opinion, consists largely of stereotypes and set topics that do not tell you much about what travellers really thought or felt.

I beg to differ. When we talk about the weather, usually it actually means something to us.

Yes, the weather is conventional in the sense that it is quite a common theme to broach in a letter or on a postcard. Yet we are not obliged to mention it. Nor are we obliged to always describe it in the same terms. If it were just a mark of good manners to say something like, for instance, ‘we are seeing some bright days here’, in the same sense as you would say ‘thank you’ when receiving a gift, that would be a full-blown convention, a formula. But except on those Gobi treks which your grandpa treats you to on your birthday, you would be perfectly free to write to him that where you are staying, the weather is miserable.

And if the weather is miserable, this really matters to you! If it’s raining all the time, this may make you cold or depressed. If it is 40 degrees Celsius in the shade, you may feel equally awful. The weather can prevent you from visiting certain places and from participating in a lot of enjoyable holiday activities.

So conventions come on different levels, in varying degrees. The weather happens to be a thing that affects us a lot, which is why, as a topic, it has become a convention in travel writing, while in its content, it remains highly specific and meaningful to the people involved.

A real traveller?

Ever since the eighteenth century or thereabouts, travellers have carried an attitude commonly called ‘anti-tourism’.

Writers characterise others as Tourists: they are lazy, superficial, conventional. Tourists go on package tours; Tourists do not speak the local language; and all Tourists really want is a snapshot of themselves with the Great, Berlin or Hadrian’s Wall, which are as interchangeable to Tourists as the motel beds they sleep in.

It is not always acknowledged that this Tourist is a construction by these writers, an image, a personage. In real life, holiday travellers’ experiences are a great deal more complex.

Still, the image is an attractive one. It allows us to style ourselves different travellers: Real Travellers.

Charles Baudelaire, photographed by Etienne Carjat, 1863 (from an article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung).

Charles Baudelaire is one of those writers who shaped our image of the Real Traveller. This is from his poem ‘Le voyage’:

Mais les vrais voyageurs sont ceux-là seuls qui partent
Pour partir; coeurs légers, semblables aux ballons,
De leur fatalité jamais ils ne s’écartent,
Et, sans savoir pourquoi, disent toujours: Allons!

In the translation by Geoffrey Wagner:

But the true travelers are they who depart
For departing’s sake; with hearts light as balloons,
They never swerve from their destinies,
Saying continuously, without knowing why: “Let us go on!”

Many of us will know the feeling this fragment evokes. The lightness it brings to leave one place, full of muddy memories and a thousand duties, and exchange it for another, fresh one. It’s a splendid feeling.

But Baudelaire does something besides describing this feeling: he sets those who feel it (‘vrais voyageurs’) apart from the rest. They are the wanderers, the wayfarers, for whom the journey is more important than the destination. Apart from the fact that this is a poetic distinction that does not exist in real life – often, the destination and the journey are both important, and the same people who have happy, ‘balloony’ feelings can also experience homesickness and anxiety – Baudelaire also chooses to set these people above the rest: those who are ‘fated’ to roam are more properly travellers than those who are actually going some place.

This tallies nicely with the rest of Baudelaire’s oeuvre, in which the protagonists are never able to find their place in the world, never satisfied, never at peace with their environment. Baudelaire himself, too, does not seem to have been very able to go somewhere and stay away for long.

It is flattering for Baudelaire as well as for ourselves to think of ourselves as the Real Travellers, especially when the activity mostly consists of dreaming of other places from the comfort of our own room, with little or no contact with the actual people and cultures we dream about.

But should we praise ourselves for our restlessness? To arrive is also an art. It is a fine romantic notion never to settle, but to depart on journeys, real or literary, has never been a particularly difficult task for the rich and male.

The hard part is staying in the new place: making do and adjusting one’s expectations and prejudices. It seems that Baudelaire did not find this pursuit worth much effort. But however wonderful some of the lines he wrote, we should not let ourselves be swept away by the authority exerted by romantic poetry. Perhaps, those who go somewhere and make an effort, however imperfect, to adapt to the new place – the Nigerian trader in Guangzhou, the Sudanese refugee in Amsterdam, the Mexican housekeeper in Los Angeles – perhaps they are the real travellers.

The standard work on anti-tourism is James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800-1918 (Oxford, 1993). Geoffrey Wagner’s translations appeared in Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (New York, 1974). My biographical impressions were largely shaped by the chapter on Baudelaire in Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel and Francis Scarfe’s introduction to his selected verse.