Tim Barrus New York Times
Take notes. The world is not your oyster. This piece is your all-too-usual garden variety photographic retouched post production brochure invigorated adventure with no regard whatsoever for the dramatic impact tourism has on the lives of the people who actually live in these places because you make it your business to filter out the realities of reality, the places you are visiting have sold their souls so you can take a selfie that you were there, and there, and there.
As a photographer (Flaunt), I have been to all of these places which makes me a bonafide hypocrite prowling for images an editor somewhere back in the States will like. I’m out to haunt more beautiful places and this whole schemedic falls apart whenever I use some editor’s eyes, and not my own. How about some poverty porn of Lagos where children live in sewer ditches. Put that in Vogue and fly there. In Appalachia, we know who the tourists are. As they waddle down Main Street in their shorts and thongs, guzzling down a supersize ice cream cone. You get a nice big chocolate on your nice big fluffy pillow.
I would argue that the world is not all that beautiful a place. There is a desperate edge to tourism in locations where tourism means that you get your very own dream job driving a bus with a microphone. You have now reached the historical parking lot George Washington parked his cars in. Interpreter of events that never happened. Tourists fresh off the bus in the middle of a hurricane. There was no electric to keep the ice cream cold. Stay home. – tim barrus