I have struggled with this exercise because my instinct was to focus on images with hidden or subtle political messages such as those of Edward Burtynsky, mentioned in my last post or some of Trevor Paglen’s work that I saw at Artes Mundi in Cardiff before Christmas.
On the face of it, Paglen’s ‘The other night sky’ looks to be very clever and quite beautiful astronomy photography but it is much more than that. According to his website,
“The Other Night Sky” is a project to track and photograph classified American satellites, space debris, and other obscure objects in Earth orbit’ (Paglen, 2011)
This and other projects are concerned with tracking and photographing military installations and communication and surveillance systems used to track our every move. His photographs are taken using long lenses and long exposures, often from several miles away.
However, I don’t think that is what is being called for here as I am asked to choose images used to assert a ‘particular ideological point of view’ (OCA, 2013), so instead I am going to focus of advertising and specifically the tourist industry. My first thought in this regard was to go back to GWR’s idyllic adverts featuring Enid Blyton’s Famous 5, whizzing off to an adventure in Cornwall, Bristol or Wales, always on a luxury super fast train with plenty of seats and to sunny exciting destinations.
As discussed in my reflection on assignment 2, there are some problems with this view. To start with, many of these destinations are quite run down, high streets have been taken over by charity, vaping and mobile phone shops, although that is unlikely to worry the Famous 5 and secondly the luxurious, spacious train is likely to be cramped, dirty and late. All of this is really only a minor irritation rather than a serious ethical issue though so instead I will focus on a travel advertisement to visit Sri Lanka and specifically the tea plantations.
Any travel brochure will tell you that having experienced the hustle bustle and the heat of the city you should head for the luxurious tea plantations in Sri Lankan hill country and see for yourself how your morning cuppa is produced. One leading tour operator claims,
‘Sri Lanka’s emerald Hill Country boasts a plethora of rustic local villages set amid lush, rolling hills of verdant forests, with acres of scenic tea plantations overlooked by soaring mountains’ (Hayes and Jarvis, 2018)
There is no doubting that the scenery is beautiful, however the picture is not quite so bright for the workers on these plantations. We are familiar with the smiling photographs of tea pickers, mainly women, who work long hours on the plantation as well as dealing with their domestic chores. Korean/American photographer Schmoo Theune visited the Sri Lankan Tea plantations to explore the production of Ceylon tea. Her photographs show a different side of the story, here. Wages are poor and pickers need to pick 18 kg of leaves to get the daily rate, equivalent to around £2.70. Housing is usually owned by the plantation owners so workers are effectively in tied housing and many settlements still have no electricity or running water. Although Sri Lanka is now officially classed as a middle income country, this wealth is not shared with the workers.
I am not sure how I would create my own image in relation to this. As I have already said, I am not a great fan of photomontage so would be unlikely to follow that route. I suppose if I did I might create a photograph of a cup of tea with perhaps a leech in the bottom of it as leeches and snakes are also issues that the tea pickers have to contend with. This is a very feeble response to this part of the exercise I know and I may return to it at a later stage once I have given it some thought.
Sources:
The true cost of your cup of tea (2014) 24 March 2014 [online] At: https://newint.org/blog/2014/03/25/sri-lanka-tea-pickers [Accessed on 1 January 2019]
Anne's Landscape Learning Log 