Exhibition Info
Site Seeing: Photographic Excursions in Tourism
Site Seeing, is a celebration of Americans' favorite pastime: tourism. It examines the historical and cultural significance of photo-graphy's influence on tourism from the nineteenth century to today. Gathering more than 200 aesthetic and vernacular artifacts drawn from the Museum's collections, this major exhibition explores essential concepts, including how photography mediates a tourist's direct experience, how it has become a stand-in for the "armchair" traveler, and how it affects the way tourists perceive other places and cultures.
Site Seeing content ranges from whimsical postcards and photo souveniers to breathtaking daguerreotypes of Niagara Falls by Platt D. Babbitt and images by Ansel Adams to contemporary photo-graphers such as Mark Klett and Martin Parr. It intertwines humanities themes of art, world history, anthropology, ethnography, literature, philosophy, and sociology.
Spanning nearly two hundred years of travel photographs, Site Seeing illustrates the inspiration and motivation photography gave to generations of tourists and armchair travelers alike eager to expand their experience of the wider world.
