Grand Canyon Semester // Prescott College // 2018

In September 2018 I had the rare opportunity to participate in Prescott College’s Grand Canyon Semester as a visiting faculty. In addition to contributing to the daily life of the 3-month field course, I taught a course called Cultural Geographies of Tourism, focusing on the production of visuality and authenticity at iconic places of tourism like the Grand Canyon. My previous work on the photographic and cartographic histories of the Grand Canyon prepared me to lead this seminar.

For the class, I designed and led two modules. The first was based in digital and web design, called “Immersive Geographies.” Here, students drew out wire frames for an imagined digital interactive feature that would address their personal research topic for the semester. The second module was “Instead of Looking at it, They Photograph it,” a workshop intended to evoke critical thinking about why one takes the pictures they do at the Grand Canyon.

For this second module, we read Walker Percy’s 1975 essay “The Loss of Creature,” which is where he introduces the concept of the “symbolic complex,” that is, the phenomenon whereby a tourist already knows what they want to see before they arrive and see the landscape: instead of looking at it--in an open phenomenological way--they simply photograph what they think it’s supposed to look like, then walk away, having achieved the tourist vision.

In an attempt to break the symbolic complex, I gave students polaroid cameras, and instructed them to take three pictures: one as a tourist on a stop-by, one as a professional photographer working on commission from a publisher, and one as a non-human animal who knows how to use a camera.