Unsettling the aesthetics of air travel through participatory tourist photography

Abstract

Air travel has been an integral part of contemporary tourism, but has been relatively under explored in terms of how it is visualised and represented as part of tourism experiences. This paper explores how the seemingly banal aspects of tourism – such as time spent waiting or transiting – are captured and represented through tourist photography. Reflecting on the process of creating a participatory artwork project, I show how tourists capture their interactions and experiences with an array of transit spaces that play a significant part of the journey. A participatory and creative methodology was employed that invited tourists to share photographs for public exhibitions. The paper explores how the photographs contributed to the artwork offer counter representations of high-speed and glamourized air travel, instead revealing a nuanced, mundane aesthetics of tourist photography and experiences of time spent in transit.