Abstract
What I highlight in this paper, and through demonstrating the digital interface, are how certain images/vistas/angles/views become iconic in the history of Lebanese tourism. Yet how might we consider the role of these images today? What is at stake in recirculating thousands of images through building a database to make them public? How does current nostalgia of the past reinscribe these images today?
A View from the View is a digital project that explores visual ephemera of the tourism industry in Lebanon from 1900-1976 specifically through postcards. Given that postcards are a genre of photography, they largely run in parallel to developments of photographic practices of the region, and worldwide. This project emerges from larger ethnographic and historic questions (sensualities, sensibilities and affects) and the digital interface presents an interface to recirculate these metonyms of tourism. On the website, there are two iterations, Eddies and Reframing, as well as a fully downloadable database of all materials/metadata. Eddies is a GPS based interface that reconstructs views from postcards on a map – which renders an actual “field of vision.” Through a larger computational cycling these fields overlap and intersect making discernible, through GIS, types of views over time. Reframing is an attempt to break each image’s composition using computer vision and image processing (Matlab) to assess borders of elements – water to sky, sky to land, land to water. This raises questions of what might be viewed as appropriate “touristic” imagery in different eras.
Through focusing on postcards, the significance of the interface is to explore what is at stake in moving beyond a flat/static catalog of imagery. It allows for new explorations, juxtapositions, and circulation of a specific genre of historical photographic images. The paper and demo of platform will also explore the creation of metadata and issues of materiality. It will also question what is
gained and lost in reconsidering a contemporary audience, modes of (digital) distribution, and how these connect to issues of memory and nostalgia today in Lebanon.
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