Photography has played a key role in this process. Already by the mid-19th century, the ‘great age of imperialism’, the Institut de France pronounced that the camera shows a ‘true’ correspondence between image and reality. One that would “provide a new, almost mechanical kind of certainty,” a certainty reinforced by the frequency one saw a particular photographic image of a particular place or of particular people.(iv) The more one saw of the same thing, the more it came to be valued, thereby increasing the desire to be there and, most especially, to be pictured in front of there. Claims of accuracy aside, photography allowed you to be anywhere you wanted, regardless of where you actually were.

These two interrelated impulses have informed the traditions of travel and studio photography from the start. Backdrops, alternately understood as both actual sites and painted (and more recently digital) ones, have played a crucial role in creating the subjecthood of the sitters. Being pictured confers and confirms the worth of the person(s) in front of the sites on display. I. Was. There.

In the 19th century, the middle classes, unable to afford the cost of commissioned oil portraits, were nonetheless able to access its photographic version. Studios proliferated – stocked with backdrops and props that imitated the domestic and leisure spaces of the wealthy – on one hand, foyers, drawing rooms and ornamental gardens, on the other, rowboats on lakes and poses amongst exotic flora and fauna. If Nerval thought ’Cairo’ was better in Paris, then a better ‘Paris’ could just as well be in Oakland!

Later, photography, primary an activity by professionals prior to WWII, became ever more available to the middle classes and some affluent sections of the working class in the Global North.

Gaye Chan + Nandita Sharma