The Cannibalistic Gaze of the Camera

In the documentary Cannibal Tours, photography and the act of photographing operate as the key illustrative displays of economic imbalance and the skewed social politics of “primitive” tourism. The camera and its associated operations and social actions are the primary loci of misunderstanding between such a bizarre and haphazard meeting of Western tourists and the indigenous village residents along the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea.

Like their missionary and colonial predecessors, the Western tourists primarily come and take from the locals without engaging in any beneficial reciprocal acts. Where the colonialists pillaged sacred sites and imposed new cultural and social structures of control, their descendents now come to gawk and take photographs. The incessant shutterbugs featured in the documentary roam the villages in a manner more reminiscent of a trip to the natural history museum, or, rather, some natural history based theme park than a remote village in a far off land. They behave in a manner that perfectly visualizes Susan Sontag’s declaration in On Photography that travel, in the age on the camera, becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.“ The village residents are treated as if they are on display, as if they are mere props in some fantastical play. As they are photographed, and, in turn, catalogued and collected by the gaze of the tourist, a casual violence is perpetrated against the reluctant indigenous subject.

Tellingly, if ironically, it is the gaze of the documentarian’s camera that attempts to problematize the disturbing relationship between the Western tourists and the people of the Sepik River. In a documentary devoid of aural narration, the camera of the documentary crew points, rather cruelly, at the Western subjects that share in its visual tradition. Through its investigative gaze and narrative construction it seeks to illustrate the cultural disparities that exist and are exacerbated by such sociocultural exchanges. Yet while attempting to gesture at some notion of photographic veracity and objectivity, the documentary ultimately only points at and reinforces the medium’s inherent tendency and affinity for identity construction by way of the limitations of the picture’s frame.