Families Seen Sightseeing: Performativity of Tourist Photography

In: Space and Culture, Band 8, Heft 4, S. 416-434

Abstract

Ideas of embodiment and performance have been crucial in destabilizing the visual hegemony of images, cameras, and gazes in tourist studies. This article discusses how a practice-inspired performance perspective potentially allows a more satisfying account of tourist photography's "nature" than conventional "representational" ones in which tourist photography is dismissed as "all eyes and no bodies and sometimes no brain." The author writes a new account, seeing tourist photography as performed rather than preformed and tourist photographers as framing as much as being framed. Tourist photography is a choreographed and experimental performance connecting the representational and nonrepresentational. Tourist photography is made less visual and more embodied, less concerned with "consuming" places than with producing social relationships, such as family life. The author examines the performances and performativities, the embodied practices and textual and corporeal choreographies, of tourist photography within a family photography context, the "family gaze." The article draws on ethnographic research of tourist photographic performances at northern Europe's largest medieval ruined castle, Hammershus.