Tourist photography and heritage. The case of the abandoned city of Pripyat

Abstract

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to present photography as an effective method for exploring abandoned heritage sites. The example of Pripyat – a city a few kilometres away from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant – will show the attitude of tourists towards a place which today is of undoubted cultural and historical value, but which is also an abandoned place. By means of semiotic and hermeneutic analysis of the photographs taken by tourists, a picture of Pripyat will be outlined, which has started to function anew in the cultural space thanks to, among others, tourist representations. A tourist’s gaze on Pripyat was analysed through the lens of four categories: must-see places, tourist performativity behaviours, the acts and ruin photos. In addition, the article outlines the direct relationship between the tourist imagination, photography, and heritage. Through tourist photography, the heritage is ‘reframed’ and domesticated. Photography also takes an active part in the process of making heritage by fragmenting the world and often putting them into a completely new context and narration and an example is abandoned Pripyat.