From the Proliferation of the Photographic to the Nullification of Truth: Personal and Commercial Narratives of Travel in Britain, 1890s-1930s

This article explores the impact that the democratisation of photography had on notions of photographic truth. It does so by focusing on the proliferation of visual narratives of travel produced by tourist photographers and travel firms in Britain between the 1890s and 1930s, a period that saw the emerging travel industry shift from using lens-based images to mixed-media. The article argues that people’s increasing familiarity with the means of representation displaced the ‘truth’ of the travel photograph from the image itself to one’s own experience of travel, forcing travel marketing to re-invent itself in an attempt to control the responses of customers