Tourist Tat (2004 - 2019)

Travelling can lead one to undiscovered treasures.

Tourist tat* is a discovery of these 'treasures'. It is a collection of photographs from my travels around the world, focusing on what must be a billion dollar industry. We visit and we buy, some of the most kitsch and audacious memorabilia around simply because we visited or went somewhere.

With the traditional vacation values that are held across the world, we save a bit for ourselves and we also bring a bit home for our family and friends. There they sit in gaudy glory, gathering dust on a shelf somewhere.

The displays that confront us on our travels are an assault on the senses, the colors and the cheesiness of it all. The sheer volumes of these products peddled every day are surely a strain on the environment and earth’s resources!

But beyond the tourist mafia, these products start to bring a smile to ones face. They offer interesting new creations, blending colors, shapes and patterns into a new vision and art form.

These photographs explore these new artistic creations, offering the viewer a different view of some of the finest collections of tat I have come across, taking the Kitsch into an art form.    

*Tat - a term, found particularly in England, referring to anything which appears shabby, cheap and tasteless.

The Package

This is a complete set of work prints used in the proposal submission and planning stages for the group exhibition. The work was exhibited for the first time in New York in 2008.

• 2008 - June - Group Show, Soho Photo Gallery, NYC

This body of work has been going on for some 15 years or so with hundreds of photographs making the cut as final selections. This subset of prints also helped form part of the planning process for the book Tourist Tat published in 2015.

The Prints - 10 x 8” x 10” work prints, Color, Luster Finish - includes certificate of authenticity