Becoming Tourist: Renegotiating the Visual in the Tourist Experience

Abstract

This paper seeks to renegotiate the role of visuals and visual practice within the tourist experience. Embracing recent developments in tourist studies, I seek to move from understanding tourism as a series of predetermined, linear and static stages through which we pass to be a tourist. In doing so, I explore the ways in which visuals in particular photography and subsequent visualities, enliven tourists' becoming through a multiplicity of fluid and dynamic performances, practices and processes. Influenced by research by authors such as Crang (1997, 1999), I suggest photography is not merely an empty practice, but rather lights up the tourist experience. The emerging dynamics of visual practice renegotiate new understandings between tourists and place to establish a series of conceptual moments that outline photography as: political artefacts, reflexive performances, the imagination of space, embodied visualities and ethical prompts. Such conceptualisations and practices of tourist photography are by no means arbitrary, but are situated in a framework of visuality that highlights key moments of anticipation, rewriting and remembrance and reliving. Thus, moving beyond notions of the hermeneutic cycle of travel, photographs and photography are understood as complex performative spaces that extend beyond divisible boundaries of the before, during and after travel experiences and infiltrate the entire tourist experience.

A sociedade do espetáculo e o ato de fotografar nas viagens

“…Por isso Urry (2001: 30) afirma ser "difícil conceber a natureza do turismo contemporâneo sem ver como tais atividades são literalmente construídas em nossa imaginação pela propaganda e pela mídia, bem como pela competição consciente entre diferentes grupos sociais". Assim, estes elementos são corresponsáveis pela construção das necessidades e dos desejos dos indivíduos ao massificarem as exibições de objetos ideais, os quais são replicados e reforçados pelos turistas (Albers & James, 1988;Canton & Santos, 2008;Scarles, 2009;Stylianow -Lambert, 2012).…”

Where words fail, visuals ignite

“…Such calls are echoed within tourism as research embraces the plurality of sensual interplays of tourist practice (see for example Crang, 1999;Franklin & Crang, 2001;Veijola & Jokinen, 1994). Indeed, as the vignette above indicates, tourism exists as a series of entirely embodied practices as tourists encounter the world multidimensionally and multisensually (Crouch & Lubbren, 2003;Scarles, 2009). Yet, despite such conceptual shifts, the visual methods employed within tourism research are yet to parallel such change.…”

“…In observing and responding to respondents' bodily reactions, researchers gain deeper insights as their embodied reflexive performances, ignited by engagement with the visual, communicate that which words can not. In such moments of silent contemplation, photographs redirect attention away from my presence and become vessels for self-reflection as visuals become co-performers in respondents' reflection (Holm, 2008;Scarles, 2009). Whether fleeting or extended, moments of contemplative silence not only enable respondents to clarify thoughts (Kamler & Threadgold, 2003, Pink, 2001), but offer opportunity to relive past experiences as shared with researcher as that-which-has-been (Barthes, 1977) is reignited within the space of the interview.…”

Pearl: living media enabled by interactive photo projection

“…This may also relate to the pressure that tourists can feel to take photos when other tourists capture photographs [34].…”

“…Especially tourists use their camera a lot more than in an everyday situation. Capturing photos can help tourists to get more control over an unfamiliar place and gives them something to do [34]. Sontag [35] even suggests that tourism has become a strategy to collect photographs.…”