The Voyager's Sublime: Kodachrome and Pacific Tourism

This chapter outlines the vast rise in tourist numbers on the seas coincided with the arrival of simpler, hands-on means for capturing the journey's 'fascinating sights' and 'colorful peoples' in moving images, leaving behind an unprecedented visual record of the Pacific tourist experience. Image production and consumption are linked to the construction of modern selves: indeed amateur filmmaking, Patricia R. Zimmermann has convincingly shown, was closely tied in the first half of the twentieth century to the assertion of patriarchal, bourgeois and familial self-identities. In amateur films shot on Pacific voyages, color stock would have been chosen for strategic reasons, ideally to supply an impact surpassing what Maxim Gorky referred to as the 'mute, grey' life offered by black and white pictures. By the 1920s and into the early 1930s, this emerging imperial identity was largely structured around a westward-gazing Pacific expansionism, further popularized after First World War through an 'avalanche' of South Seas-themed literary and cinematic fantasy.