Letter of Recommendation: Souvenir Photo Viewers

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/15/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-souvenir-photo-viewers.html

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This past spring, I spent two months subletting an apartment in Amsterdam, where tourists not infrequently outnumber residents. The day I arrived, I was struck by how many American accents I heard and how many selfie sticks jutted out onto the narrow sidewalks near the canals in the Nine Streets. Nothing made tourists more visible than their fervent Instagramming and ever-present iPhones. Jogging in the Vondelpark, I saw a tourist crash a bike while videoblogging. From a hotel lobby on Keizersgracht, I watched someone climb onto a locked bike near the canal, take a photo on it and then go about her afternoon. Ask a local about the tourism in Amsterdam, and you’re likely to receive an eye roll and a comment about how it’s “out of control,” as one cafe owner told me during my first week there. Last year, the city attracted almost 20 million visitors, but there are fewer than one million residents. In December, locals became so frustrated by tourist congestion that the city removed the “I amsterdam” sign near the Rijksmuseum, which reportedly generated upward of 6,000 photographs per day. Many of these photos very likely ended up on Instagram, where the hashtag #iamsterdam has been used 1.54 million times and counting.

Souvenir photos weren’t always so easily reproduced. My grandmother’s nightstand displays a bouquet of key chains, each a truncated pyramid with a hole on one end and a piece of flat, once-white plastic snapped onto the other. They resemble loupes for examining gemstones, and most are emblazoned with the name of a resort, in tacky metallic gold. If you raise one of these souvenirs to the light and peer through the lens, you will see a backlit 35-millimeter slide on the other end, its colors reflected against each of the four sides like a kaleidoscope. My grandmother has 16 of these key chains — from the Loews Paradise Island Hotel and Villas, Fernwood in the Poconos, the Bahamas Princess Tower and other destinations bookable by a travel agent circa 1985.

Viewer key chains were popular at amusement parks, resorts and national parks from the 1950s through the 1990s. In most cases, a photographer would walk around, take your picture and hand you a ticket to exchange for the photo later in the day, either as a print or a key chain. Sometimes you’d need to find your photo on a wall, behind a counter. The resulting souvenir is pure kitsch; its only purpose is to view a single photo, so its clunkiness is both warranted and extra. In 2019, if you carry one on your keys, it’s a fashion statement conveying nostalgia and sentimentality: a Hawaiian shirt of key chains. When you hold it up to the light, you see colors that come into focus the closer you draw it to your face, the image revealing itself slowly. Because your other eye is closed, and the room around you is blocked by plastic siding, it is easy to imagine that you are looking at the only image in the world. Even if they sit in drawers, these key chains beg to be viewed, the way conch shells ask to be held to the ear. Each one is a small mystery — it’s impossible to tell which image is inside by looking at its plastic armor. My mother says the experience is similar to rediscovering a memory.

Souvenir photo viewers are antithetical to Instagram tourism because they permit only one person to view an image at a time. The photos themselves are largely unremarkable, as they weren’t intended to prove that a person mastered a vacation — by capturing the photo intended to amass the most desirable number of “likes” — but only that he or she took one.

These days, travel photos are captured with the understanding that they will be shared on social media in a feed of hundreds of other photos, further calcifying your personal brand. For much of the 20th century, the novelties of travel photography were not a photo’s framing or the caption but the photo itself, which commemorated the luxury of travel: Tourism was romanticized, and because rolls of film were finite, every photo was precious. Now, instead of displaying a photo from a place on your desk, it matters which photos from which places are displayed on your Instagram page, as a public record of where you’ve been and how you want to be perceived. Last year, for this magazine, Teju Cole observed that travelers often take photos of the same landmarks from the same angles, making originality even harder to achieve. But if these travel photos are for ourselves, to help us remember where we’ve been, why should originality matter? Shouldn’t the photos resemble our experiences? What purpose should they serve besides sparking a memory?

There is one souvenir photo in my grandmother’s room that continues to mystify me. In it, my mother is in her mid-20s, just a few years older than I am now, walking on a path in the Bahamas with my great-grandmother, who died before I was born. There is no context in the image whatsoever, no clue about where they’re going or where they’re coming from. Of course I’ve asked, and my mother doesn’t remember, but when I put the viewer up to my eye, it feels almost as if I do. I look at the photo slowly — not via a quick scroll — taking a journey down a tunnel toward what feels like an image projected on a movie screen. It comes into focus slowly at first, then all at once, just the way it’s supposed to.