THE TOURIST GAZE TOURISM CONFERENCE
RALEIGH, NC JUNE 12 2021
CONTENTS INTRODUCTION JOHN URRY ULRIKE GRETZEL CHURNJEET MAHN MODERATED BY REFERENCES
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INTRODUCTION This conference will focus on a phenomenon called the tourist gaze. Tourism is an ever booming industry that reaches worldwide. However, nowadays tourists are experiencing the world through the lenses of their cell phones and they are continuing to get stuck behind a screen. The world is filled with extensive beauty and amazing artifacts, but we are losing our connection to the real world through our electronic devices.
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EVENTS
Sign In
9:30am
Opening
10:00am
John Urry
10:30am
Ulrike Gretzel
11:30am
Break
12:30pm
Churnjeet Mahn
1:00pm
Conclusion
2:00pm
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10:30 am
GAZING AND PREFORMING JOHN URRY John Richard Urry is a British sociologist who served as a professor at Lancaster University. He is noted for work in the fields of the sociology of tourism and mobility. He wrote books on many aspects of modern society including the transition away from “organized capitalism”, tourist gaze, the sociology of nature and environmentalism, and social theory in general.
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Reflecting modernity’s hegemony of the visual and postmodernity’s lust for spectacle, it portrays tourism as `ways of seeing’ and highlights how many tourist buildings, objects, technologies, and practices are structured through cameras, photographs, adverts, themed spaces, images, and so on.
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The Tourist Gaze is one of the most discussed and cited tourism books (with about 4000 citations on Google scholar). Whilst wide ranging in scope, the book is known for the Foucaultinspired concept of the tourist gaze that brings out the fundamentally visual and image-saturated nature of tourism encounters. Reflecting modernity’s hegemony of the visual and postmodernity lust for spectacle, it portrays tourism as `ways of seeing’ and highlights how many tourist buildings, objects, technologies, and practices are structured through cameras, photographs, adverts, themed spaces, images, and so on. The pleasures of much tourism are grounded in the enjoyment of gazing or visually consuming places that are out of the ordinary in some way or other. Objects of the tourist gaze are different and extraordinary. In early formulations of the tourist gaze the distinction between home and away and the ordinary and extraordinary generates what may come to be recognised and enjoyed as the objects of the tourist gaze. The concept of the gaze highlights that looking is a learned ability and
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that the pure and innocent eye is a myth. What the medical gaze saw, and made visible, was not a simple preexisting reality simply waiting `out there’, according to Foucault. Instead, it was an epistemic field, constructed linguistically as much as visually. Seeing is what the human eye does. Gazing refers to the `discursive determinations’ - socially constructed seeing or `scopic regimes’. Forster refers to: ``how we are able to see, allowed or made to see, and how we see this seeing or the unseen herein.” To depict vision as natural or the product of atomised individuals naturalises its social and historical nature - and the power relations of looking. The tourist gaze is as socially organised and systematised as is the gaze of the medic. Of course, it is of a different order in that it is not a gaze confined to professionals ‘supported and justified by an institution.’ And yet even in the production of `unnecessary’ pleasure many professional experts help to construct and develop one’s gaze as a tourist. The tourist gaze draws attention to the socially patterned and learnt ways of seeing. While not authorised by a single knowledge-generating institution,
many tourist experts and media such as film, television, and photography construct and regulate the varied gazes of tourists. Gazing at particular sights is framed by rules and styles as well as by circulating images and texts of this and other places. Such ‘frames’ enable tourists to see the physical forms and material spaces before their eyes as `interesting, good, or beautiful’. They are not the property of individual sight. The tourist gaze comprises discourses, learned visual practices, signs, visual technologies, places for viewing, camera-wearing tourists, and visually ‘extraordinary’ places. It is constructed through signs with tourism involving the collecting of signs. While the visual is not the only sense, it is the organising sense. It organises the place, role, and effect of the other senses. The unusualness of the visual sensations places these within a different frame. The distinctiveness of the visual is crucial for giving all sorts of practices and performances a special or unique character. The most mundane of activities - such as shopping, strolling, having a drink, swimming or river
rafting - appear extraordinary and become `touristic’ when conducted against a striking or unusual visual backcloth. As Bell and Lyall argue even with regard to adventure tourism: ``nature tourism as kinaesthetic experience - paddled through, jumped into, trekked across - is still dependent on the glorious vista.” However, some recent literature has critiqued this notion of the tourist gaze for reducing tourism to visual experiences - to sightseeing - and neglecting the other senses, bodily experiences, and `adventure’.
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11:30 am
SELFIE-TAKING AS TOURISTIC LOOKING
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With tourists’ increasing use of social media for photosharing, one of the core concepts underlying tourist photography is digital immediacy, which means that because of networked travel photos communicate: ‘‘not just, ‘I was here’; but ‘I am here, right now, having this experience in real-time, and here is the evidence that this is the case.’”
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ULRIKE GRETZEL
Ulrike Gretzel is currently the Director of Research at Netnografica, an innovative market research company that provides actionable insights by extracting meaning from online conversations.
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The popularity of selfies derives from the increase of internetenabled smartphones, adoption of front-facing cameras and growth of visual-centric social media platforms. Smart phones play a critical role in facilitating selfie culture because they support both the picture capture and the instant upload. The introduction of the reversible, front-facing screen on the iPhone 4 in 2010 that allowed users to see themselves as they are taking a picture of themselves was a crucial design innovation that paved the way to smart-phone supported selfies. Mobile apps that permit instantaneous editing and enhancing of one’s digital self-portraits as well as the use of the folksonomy and hashtag #selfie played
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a central role in the naming and social diffusion of the trend. Importantly, as tourists increasingly share pictures online, even traditional cameras start to be internet-enabled to support tourists in their mobile practices. This development facilitates digital immediacy and makes immediate online touristic self-presentations possible. Perhaps more importantly, photos increasingly serve as avenues for self-presentation on the Internet and particularly on social media. The selfie first became widely shared online as a profile picture on social network sites to aid users’ self-presentation vis-à-vis other community members. Today selfies are ubiquitous on social network sites and have become an integral part of users’ online identities. As social media provide tourists with a larger and instant audience, previous research has argued that social media allow tourists to engage in identity management. Tourists keep social media in mind and are found to engage in identity management during various stages of tourist photography. It is argued that what tourists share on social media is carefully selected and potentially edited
to elicit desired reactions. The boundaries of what is and is not considered a selfie are fuzzy and are becoming more blurred. For instance, the self-timer on a traditional camera could be seen as a selfie-friendly technology. From a representational perspective, camera manufacturers sell accessories, such as selfie-sticks, that facilitate the taking of selfies from a farther distance, making them look like regular photographs. Today, selfies may also include other people in the picture. Selfies are not considered self portraits but rather ‘‘portraits of the self in the act of self-portrayal.” Leaning on Freund’s (1980) tracing of the history of portrait photography, in which she described smiling—or performing—for the camera as a learned behaviour within a particular visual culture, Wendt (2014) argues that new facial expressions, such as the ‘duck face’ that is prominently displayed in selfies, are also learned behaviour and parodies of portraits in the age of social media. From a practice-oriented perspective selfies are also not necessarily taken by the photographer, as is the case with tourismorganization sponsored drones in the
example of Tourism New Zealand. Because of the blurred boundaries we consider the selfie as evolving and subject to changing technologies and practices that accompany it. The contemporary notion of the selfie involves a digital picture of the self or parts thereof posted on social media platforms and often tagged with #selfie but not necessarily so. We understand it not as confined to one specific type of technology or a specific genre of photograph or video, but as characterized by the desire to frame the self in a picture taken to be shared with an online audience. While the practice of photographic selfportraits is not new, the selfie practice is: The technological assemblage of digital photography allowing for more photo-taking, smartphones/selfie-sticks allowing the tourists greater control over the photos and social-media sharing with the use of folksonomies and verbal cues to describe photos creates a new genre. This allows us to fit the selfie in with tourist photography which we also see as ‘‘a social practice, a networked technology, a material object and an image.”
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1:00 pm
THE VIRTUAL TOURIST GAZE IN GREECE CHURNJEET MAHN Churnjeet Mahn is a researcher in literature with expertise in travel writing, race, and sexuality. Her work on travel began with a study of British women’s travel to Greece in the long nineteenth century and the complicity of feminist movements with discourses of racism and Orientalism.
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The tourist gaze is differentiated from “seeing” as, “People gaze upon the world through a particular filter of ideas, skills, desires and expectations, framed by social class, gender, nationality, age and education. Gazing is a performance that orders, shapes and classifies, rather than reflects the world.”
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The tourist gaze is differentiated from “seeing” as, “People gaze upon the world through a particular filter of ideas, skills, desires and expectations, framed by social class, gender, nationality, age and education. Gazing is a performance that orders, shapes and classifies, rather than reflects the world.” The model for the tourist gaze describes the tense relationship between a relatively unique and individual perspective, which is determined by a range of social factors such as class and gender, and the collective understanding or representation of a place. Urry and Larsen identify the emergence of photography as a crucial moment that heralds the age of the tourist gaze; however there is a limited discussion of the ways in which specific historical innovations in visual technologies adapt/change/qualify that gaze in their analysis, which instead moves forward to more recent tourist photography. Indeed, the substantial chapter on photography has only been added in the most recent 2011 edition of the text which is aptly titled, The Tourist Gaze 3.0. In the photograph, “Nature
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was tamed, put into perspective with, and by, the human eye, as a landscape picture, a single vision of order.” The description of this singular vision has been critiqued for reducing the complexity of the gaze in tourist situations. The “mutual gaze” has gained recent currency as a way of describing the layered interactions of gazes, especially in terms of discussing the way tourists themselves can be an object of gaze or enquiry. For the purposes of this study, two aspects of Urry and Larsen definition of the tourist gaze are utilised to offer a working framework for discussion that can be developing by recent work on viewing Greek culture in the late nineteenth century. Urry and Larsen list nine characteristics of the tourist gaze, two of which underlie this study. Firstly, the tourist gaze concentrates on key features of landscape which are “out of the ordinary” and are often “visually objectified” and technologically reproduced through the medium of photography or film. Secondly, the tourist gaze is understood as signs through which a place
can become recognisable, for example, the Eiffel tour and Paris equate to romance. In the context of this discussion, the tourist gaze is understood as a system for producing, reproducing and circulating images of tourist sites which have a series of ideological associations encoded into their form and content. By analysing an early type of virtual tourism, this study focuses on the way a relatively limited repository of images was used to represent a tourist journey through Greece between 1897–1905. More specifically, by considering the selection of certain images and the relationship between the viewer and the image, this study contributes to an understanding of how tourist stereotypes about Greece emerged, persisted and developed into the early twentieth century. A discussion of the stereographs contributes to a more nuanced appreciation of the varieties of tourist gazes that have been in operation, especially in the ways they spatially position the tourist. The following discussion will offer an overview of the discursive cleavage between travel and tourism in the arts and humanities to clarify the definition of those key
terms. This is followed by a rationale for the period covered by early tourism in Greece and an overview of current relevant research undertaken primarily, although not exclusively, in the arts and humanities. This will contribute to developing an analytic framework that can utilise Underwood & Underwood’s Greece Through the Stereoscope as a case study for a specific iteration of the tourist gaze and how it contributed to generating, as well as challenging, stereotypes of Greek landscape and culture.
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MODERATOR DREW BINSKY My name is Drew Binsky and I make daily travel videos as I visit every country on earth (currently 194/197). My goal is to inspire young adults to travel, while shattering stereotypes that the world is unsafe. Drew Binsky® Travel Videos are more like short documentaries, telling unique stories about people, food, culture and anything else I find interesting on the road. You will also find tons of travel tips, hacks and advice. In my non-video making life, I’m a scratch golfer, EDM music lover, people-person, and I hold 2 Guinness World Records! Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any travel questions you may have. I am @DrewBinsky on all social media platforms.
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REFERENCES Dinhopl, Anja, and Ulrike Gretzel. “Selfie-Taking as Touristic Looking.” Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 57, Jan. 2016, pp. 126–139., doi:10.1016/j.annals.2015.12.015. Larsen, Jonas, and John Urry. “Gazing and Performing.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 29, no. 6, 2011, pp. 1110–1125., doi:10.1068/d21410. Larsen, Jonas, et al. “Networks and Tourism.” Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 34, no. 1, 2007, pp. 244–262., doi:10.1016/j.annals.2006.08.002. Mahn, Churnjeet. “The Virtual Tourist Gaze in Greece, 1897–1905.” Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 48, Sept. 2014, pp. 193–206., doi:10.1016/j.annals.2014.06.001. Matina Terzidou, Dimitrios Stylidis & Konstantinos Terzidis (2018) The role of visual media in religious tourists’ destination image, choice, and on-site experience: the case of Tinos, Greece, Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, 35:3, 306-319, DOI: 10.1080/10548408.2017.1304316
