Tourist Photographs Research Articles

‘Reverse gaze’ in spiritual tourism: fact or myth?

ABSTRACT The term ‘reverse gaze’ is used in tourism academia to describe the interaction between tourist photographers and local subjects, which challenges traditional power dynamics in tourism. However, further research is needed to explore this concept within the wider context of tourism. In this research note, I adopt an autoethnographic approach to provide a reflective analysis of the Ganga Aarti ritual in India. Specifically, I examine the nuances of the reverse gaze concept in the realm of spiritual tourism, contributing to a deeper understanding of its dynamics. Through exploring the interplay between tourists and locals during the Ganga Aarti ritual, this study sheds light on the transformative power of the reverse gaze and its implications for cultural immersion and spiritual experiences. The empirical findings contribute to the existing body of knowledge in tourism studies and provide opportunities for further exploration in this area.

Spatial sight analysis of Hangzhou Xiaoyingzhou based on tourists' landscape preference

Tourist preferences are important for the high-quality planning and design of recreation spaces. The famous scenic locale of West Lake in Hangzhou, China, is used as an example in this study. Based on multi-source data (e.g., online comments, and tourist photographs), we used content analysis, kernel density estimation, and image semantic segmentation technology to determine the spatial distribution of tourists' landscape preferences. We analyzed these spatial sight characteristics from the viewpoint, sight distance, and perspectives. The results show that tourists' landscape preferences are mainly concentrated on landscape architecture for recreation. The viewpoints of these preferences are concentrated in the north-south embankment—far beyond that of the east-west embankment. The preferences also show a spatial sequence in terms of sight distance, and the best visual effect is the open platform at the north and south islands of Xiaoyingzhou. From the perspective of vision, the degree of spatial openness in the tourists' landscape preferences is proportional to the distance of vision; the two factors have a convergent relationship. The discussion of the characteristics of tourists’ landscape preference and space sight creation in Xiaoyingzhou provides a reference for the quality improvement of island recreation space.

Tracking destination visual narratives: photographic compositions from longer stay tourists

ABSTRACT The photographs that contemporary travellers disseminate quickly and effortlessly to a global online audience are a valuable resource for scholars and for practitioners seeking to shape destination image. They merit more in-depth understanding. However, viewers are detached from the process of producing photos for online dissemination, thereby limiting insights provided by examinations of what the photos were intended to represent. The current authors pursue deeper understanding by studying visual effects at ‘face value’, rather than interpreting intended meanings. The authors consider the visual effects of narratives that longer stay tourists to Hong Kong share on social networking sites, including content, colour, spatial organization and expressiveness elements. A longitudinal and non-representational research approach is adopted to address the disjuncture and separation between the photo production and reception processes. It is concluded that tourist photographs: a) form groupings around compositional elements; b) change in content and composition over the course of an extended visit and c) generate identifiable visual impacts, based on their compositions. Destination authorities can develop emotion-inducing visual compositions with online resonance by considering the aesthetics of tourist photographs.

What does colour tell about tourist experiences?

Tourist experiences are the product of a temporally extended series of events and activities. The temporal distance from actual experiences distorts the recalled evaluation of their experiences so tourists photograph to record their experiences and consume the place. Tourist photographs build a positive image of a destination when they effectively evoke positive feelings (i.e. affective image) and provide clear information about the physical and functional characteristics (i.e. cognitive image) of the destination. Despite its strong evocative power in constructing a meaning and assessing the place and experience, colour receives little attention in existing tourist photograph literature. Assuming colour as a proxy of tourist experiences, I explore whether, and how, colour in tourist photographs represents tourist experiences and destination consumption. The psychophysical paradigm, which proposes that the quality of the scenery or landscape reflects not only its intrinsic attributes but also the eyes of the beholder, provides a theoretical foundation. A purposely developed colour extraction and analysis tool identifies colour distribution patterns from 2,131 tourist photographs and Leximancer discovers word-like concepts (e.g. regular nouns and adjectives) from the corresponding comments and tags collected from the Facebook of Queensland Tourism Board in Australia. Findings reveal five distinctive groups based on colour distribution patterns and associated concepts. For example, tourist photographs of Fraser Coast show dominantly blue and secondarily orange whereas photographs of Sunshine Coast show balanced blue and orange. Tourist photographs from the destinations sharing similar geographic characteristics often display dissimilar colour patterns. It suggests that destinations can be grouped together by colour patterns and conceptual similarity, instead of geographical characteristics. The results further support that colours in tourist photographs are a significant representamen of tourist experiences and destination image.

Traveling through Cyberspace: Tourism and Photography in Virtual Worlds

This paper gives an overview of the ways in which virtual worlds (graphical chat and online gaming environments) make extensive use of travel and tourism themes and how online photography (screen capturing) serves to further this metaphor. Marketing materials on informational sites and in corporate press releases describe virtual worlds in much the same way a travel brochure might describe an offline tourist destination: as an exotic vacation spot, an online theme park, or even a second home. Visitors to virtual worlds further this metaphor through the taking of digital tourist photographs in the form of screen captures of scenic views and in-world monuments. Some virtual tourists even create online photo albums and travel journals of their virtual world adventures and show them proudly to family and friends. This paper also serves, in its own way, as a sort of travel journal, taking the reader on a tour through many virtual worlds.

Using social media to discover unwanted behaviours displayed by visitors to nature parks: comparisons of nationally and privately owned parks in the Greater Kruger National Park, South Africa

ABSTRACT Managers of protected areas that are popular among tourists need to combine conservation goals with assurances of visitor safety while providing high-quality service. The compromise amongst these goals is reflected in the protected area regulations; however, monitoring of compliance with these regulations is costly and laborious. Social media present a new opportunity to observe visitor behaviour patterns in an unobtrusive and inexpensive manner. We propose a method of using online tourist photographs to monitor unwanted behaviours of the natural area visitors. The specific research object was the Greater Kruger National Park (GKNP) in South Africa, which is one of the largest game parks worldwide. We found that approximately 7% of the photographs depict instances of potentially unwanted behaviour. The results also indicate that the types of unwanted behaviours differ between the federally and privately owned parks, although the overall percentage of unwanted behaviours in the two types of parks is similar.

‘Pinning’ tourist photographs: analyzing the photographs shared on Pinterest of heritage tourist destinations

ABSTRACTWith more tourists researching and booking their travel entirely online, the use of social networking sites (SNSs) has gained popularity amongst both tourists and destination marketing organizations (DMOs). This study examined tourist photographs shared online via the image-based SNS of Pinterest in an effort to understand whether these types of new consumer technologies might be used by DMOs to better target potential visitors. Through visual analysis, the Pinterest photographs of four heritage tourist destinations were explored: Tombstone, Arizona; Virginia City, Nevada; Deadwood, South Dakota; and Dodge City, Kansas. Study findings provide discussion of Pinterest photographs, their visual representation of heritage tourist destinations, and the unique insights that an analysis of these photographs might offer to DMOs.

“The Child of the World’s Old Age”: Australian Perceptions of Japan-as-Child

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the important symbolic role of photographs of children in the context of developing diplomatic and trade relationships between Australia and Japan between the 1880s and 1920s. A fascinating series of studio, commercial and tourist photographs are examined, including commemorative postcards marking the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and hand-coloured lantern slides produced commercially in Japan. Building on political and military studies of Australian–Japanese relations, it explores the ways that Australian–Japanese relationships were mediated and reproduced through photography practices operating across private and public domains. In these photographs, children feature simultaneously as the face of Japan and an interface for political and cultural interpretation. As photographs of children helped to reinforce conflicting conceptions of Japan as a children’s paradise, a budding military power and an industrial threat, they offer insight into Australian anxieties about what modernity meant for the two Asia-Pacific nations.

Monument Valley, Instagram, and the Closed Circle of Representation

Monument Valley, Instagram, and the Closed Circle of Representation

The sacred, the profane, and the space in between: site-specific performance at Auschwitz

ABSTRACTThe concept of performance in the concentration camps is not a new one. Rovit and Goldfarb (1999) have chronicled a range of inmate performances from the cabarets of Theresienstadt to the variety shows at Auschwitz-Birkenau, created for many diverse reasons. Yet since the liberation of the camps there has been virtually no theatrical performance in these sites of memory. The very notion is generally seen as taboo, but the reasons for this are somewhat vague and appear to centre around the widespread idea of performance as ‘frivolous’; to perform within a concentration camp would be to somehow deface Holocaust memory and mock the suffering of those imprisoned there. Such ‘profane’ performance can be located within the ‘selfie’ photographs of tourists visiting the camps. But what of the daily shows that take place in the guise of guided tours – ‘sacred’ performances? What makes these performances acceptable to the public and the camp authorities, when theatrical performances are not? Can there ever be an acceptable theatrical performance within a concentration camp?Taking Auschwitz-Birkenau as a case study, this article seeks to address these questions through a considered discussion of ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ performances in the camp. It begins by outlining the components of the guided tour, from the learned script of the guide to the ‘promenade performance’ nature of the space, and what makes this a ‘sacred’ performance. It defines the ‘profane’ performance hypothesis through a reflection upon several examples of tourist photographs taken within Auschwitz. It questions where site-specific theatrical performance would fall within these parameters through an interrogation of aspects including its purpose, the identity of the performers, the (intended) audience, and the short- and long-term ramifications for the performance and the camp. Ultimately, this article probes whether site-specific performance at Auschwitz could ever be efficacious and anything but profane.

Tourist Photographers and the Promotion of Travel: the Polytechnic Touring Association, 1888–1939

The Polytechnic Touring Association (PTA) was a London-based, originally philanthropic turned commercial travel firm whose historical origins coincided with the arrival of the Kodak camera in 1888—thus, of popular (tourist) photography. This article examines the PTA’s changing relationship with tourist photographers, and how this influenced the company’s understanding of what role photography could play in promoting the tours, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This inquiry is advanced on the basis of the observation that, during this time, the PTA’s passage from viewing tourists as citizens to educate, to customers to please, paralleled the move from using photography-based images to mixed media. Such a development was certainly a response to unprecedented market demands; this article argues that it should also be considered in relation to the widening of photographic perceptions engendered by the democratization of the medium, to which the PTA responded, first as educator, then as service provider. In doing so, the article raises several questions about the shifting relationship between “high,” or established, and “low,” or emerging, forms of culture, as mass photography and the mass marketing of tourism developed.

On Writing with Photography

On Writing with Photography

Effect of tourist photographs on attitudes towards destination: Manifest and latent content

In the sender-message-receiver communication model, tourist photographs project organic destination images which are interpreted on the receiving end of the communication channel by potential tourists, influencing their tourism-related attitudes and affecting behavior. This study investigated how photographs taken by American and Korean tourists while visiting Russia and posted in travel blogs and on media-sharing websites affect perceptions of Russia as a travel destination by those who view these images. The study specifically focused on latent content of tourist photographs with respect to such destination attributes as crowdedness, cleanliness, level of economic development, personal safety, level of modernity, friendliness, uniqueness, and extent of commercialization, as well as affective qualities of destination places. Researchers evaluated the interplay between the manifest and latent content of the images and how each type of content separately and both types together affected attitudes of viewers towards the destination and their desire to visit it.

Emediating the tourist gaze: memory, emotion and choreography of the digital photograph

Robinson (Current Issues Tour Res 15(4):353–367, 2012, Mediating the tourist experience from brochures to virtual encounters. Farnham, Ashgate, 2013) explored the notion of an e-mediated tourist gaze. This paper builds on this idea, in order to evaluate the context within which images are recorded, manipulated and distributed. Google Earth is selected as the medium for this because its geo-spatial format links tourist photographs to the site where the image was captured. The research adopts a primarily qualitative inductive study to identify sociological perspectives on the collection, publication and sharing of images online, using members of Google Earth forums as the sample, and asking further questions around travel planning to tie the research back to the relationship between online image and travel from a production perspective. The research identifies strong links with memory, emotion and choreography and proposes that digital images have created new areas for research into electronic visual media. Whilst Urry and Larsen (The tourist gaze 3.0. Sage, London, 2011) note that these images potentially lead an unprotected and uncontrolled afterlife, it is argued that they also serve a purpose for a future-self as a mediator of nostalgia. The research develops hypotheses for future research around the emotional relationships bound up in the creation and collection of tourism images and the role of the e-mediated gaze.

‘So much for snapshots’: The material relations of tourists as cultural dupes

Academic publishing houses tend to be in the business of words not images, but is this any reason for tourism scholars to be remiss about photographs themselves? It is a curious fact that very few tourist photographs are included in tourism research despite the importance of the claims that are built upon them. One of these is that cultural dupes are made from tourist photography – that their photographic practices cast them as such – but the duping process is far from convincing or satisfactory particularly in the absence of the photographs themselves. This article tracks down the missing tourist photographs by following the material relations that constitute the duping process and the remarkable, immaterial life of the tourist photograph as a resource for tourism scholarship. Once rediscovered, these photographs can be redeployed and increasingly are deployed in digital forms of materialism that are comparatively flexible, public and mobile. This new material configuration simultaneously casts the cultural dupe as an artefact of the analogue age and this invites examination of the power of digital contexts to trouble existing assumptions. Stengers’ use of the ‘idiot’ can be fruitfully employed to demonstrate a tourist who misbehaves in new technological freedoms, and challenges existing scholarly interpretations and frameworks.

Tourist clusters from Flickr travel photography

During decades researchers have been interested in investigating the most salient elements of tourists' pictures, without considering whether there might be different patterns of photographer behaviour. Considering this background, this paper aims to examine the common features of the tourist-photographer's gaze. By analysing a sample of pictures of a Pyrenees destination (Boí Valley) uploaded in Flickr, the authors first identify the attributes of photos; and second, by means of a cluster analysis, determine the existence of four groups of tourist photographers. The analysis reveals that although all photographers share common features in their pictures, there are other elements which define different photographer's behaviour.

Beyond the Margins: Identity Fragmentation in Visual Representation in Michel Tournier’s La Goutte d’or

In the final scene of Michel Tournier’s postcolonial novel La Goutte d’or (1986), the protagonist, Idriss, shatters the glass of a Cristobal & Co. storefront window while operating a jackhammer in the working-class Parisian neighbourhood on the Rue de la Goutte d’or. Glass fragments fly everywhere as the Parisian police arrive. In La Goutte d’or, Tournier explores the identity construction of Idriss through a discussion of the role that visual images play in the development of a twentieth-century consciousness of the “Other.” At the beginning of the novel, a French tourist takes a photograph of Idriss during her visit to the Sahara. The boy’s quest to reclaim his stolen image leads him from the Sahara to Marseille, and finally to the Rue de la Goutte d’or in Paris. The Rue de la Goutte d’or remains one the most cosmopolitan neighbourhoods of the city. In Tournier’s novel, the goutte d’or also corresponds to a symbolic object: a Berber jewel. It is the jewel that Idriss brings with him, but which he also subsequently loses upon his arrival in Marseille. From the very moment that the French tourist photographs him, a marginalization of Idriss’s identity occurs. Marginality, quite literally, refers to the spatial property of a location in which something is situated. Figuratively speaking, marginality suggests something that is on the edges or at the outer limits of social acceptability. In this essay, I explore the construction of the marginalized postcolonial self (the “Other”) through an examination of the function of visual representation in the development of a postcolonial identity in La Goutte d’or. In the end, I conclude that the construction of a postcolonial identity is based upon fragmentation and marginalization, which ultimately leads its subject to create an identity based upon false constructions.

Tourist photographs: signs of self

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the reasons that tourists capture images of their trips on cameras or camcorders.Design/methodology/approachOver a period of approximately five years, the authors observed, photographed and interviewed tourists taking photos or videos in diverse international locations. Upon returning home, informants e‐mailed their trip photos together with descriptions of what the images meant and what they had done with them when at home. These data were archived and interpreted in line with the central research questions.FindingsWhy does almost every tourist carry a camera or camcorder? What are they doing making these images? And what do they do with them once they return home? The accompanying video conveys most of the findings, while the manuscript elaborates on certain theoretical points and provides contextualizing and supportive evidence from the literatures dealing with tourism and photography.Originality/valueThe paper suggests that the images form part of an identity project, serving as a means of conveying internal tales to the self rather than as a means of, beyond the immediate family, communicating with others. The images act as tools for displacing meanings that are too fragile and tenuous to be contained in the fragile present as Grant McCracken describes more generally with regard to tying hopes and dreams to places and times of the past and future.

Understanding the Relationship between Tourism Destination Imagery and Tourist Photography

Photography and tourism are widely considered to be intrinsically linked. Photographs play a crucial role in the promotion of tourism destinations, working through a range of media including brochures, television commercials, and picture postcards. Meanwhile the practice of photography is often held to be intimately related to the condition of being a tourist. Urry (1990) links these two phenomena, suggesting that they may constitute a self-reinforcing "closed circle of representation" in which tourist photographs both reflect and inform destination images. Using an innovative research approach combining visitor-employed photography with content analysis and quantitative statistical techniques, this article presents an empirical test of Urry's theory. Mixed evidence is found, suggesting that while in many respects the circle of representation may indeed be at work, in certain other respects it may not be. This suggests that a more fine-grained and nuanced understanding of the circle of representation is required.

Dental disease in rescued dancing bears

I was asked to go out with the charity, International Animal Rescue, together with a human dentist and trustee of the charity, Paul Cassar, to assess the dental disease present and start a dental care program with the Indian vets. Unfortunately when the canine teeth first erupt, they are deliberately fractured with a rod or hammer, done whilst the bear is conscious. This is done to help control the bear and also so the bear appears less aggressive for tourist photographs. Some gypsies may use rags to stop the bleeding and some realize that the bear is uncomfortable and use cloths saturated with oils or camphor to act as a painkiller on the live pulp tissue. The age at which the teeth are fractured seems to vary and all four canines are usually fractured at the same time.This is just one of the horrific procedures that these bears undergo.All bears have their muzzle pierced with an iron rod to allow a rope to be threaded through for control and many bears are castrated conscious.