ABSTRACT
Continuing a theme developed in an earlier volume, Travelling Light—Photography, Travel and Visual Culture, the chapter considers mostly contemporary photographic approaches to travel and mobility. Travel and mobility are understood in an extensive way, including car journeys and accidents, the motorised landscape, the creation of the motorised subject (drivers), the question of speed, chaos, energy and modernization, the addiction to travel and speed, but also the mobile eyes of the drones, the airport as an apparatus of power and a wilderness of information and the deskbound financial trader as digital traveller. The chapter reflects on the presiding tension in contemporary mobility between rapture and control, between release and impedance as revealed in the work discussed. The chapter argues that mobility and travel are central aspects of contemporary life. Photography’s widespread engagement in these experiences and conditions encourage it to adopt new forms and approaches, revealing how modern mobilities may have changed human perception and certainly demand new modes and styles of representation. These themes also represent further confirmatons of the medium’s critical function in today’s culture.
