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. 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, I move beyond notions of the hermeneutic cycle of travel, and present photographs and photography as complex performative spaces that extend beyond divisible boundaries of the before, during, and after travel experiences and infiltrate the entire tourist experience.

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