Introduction - Tourism and Visual Culture: Theories and Concepts - page 3

can at one level be described as the world's
largest industry (if that is to be believed) but at
a more profound level as part of our everyday
existence.
We clearly need to see tourism as more
than a supply chain ending in deckchairs and
ice creams. It is part of the mass-mediated, post-
industrial, postmodern society that has spawned
tourists who seek instant gratifi cation in the
dreamscapes, landscapes, ethnoscapes and
heritagescapes 2 created and provided by the
tourism sector.
The place of tourism in visual culture, as
spectacle, voyeurism, metaphor or phantasma-
goria, is well established but seemingly so
embedded that it is somewhat neglected or
overlooked in what might be described as a
problem of ubiquity - both of images and tour-
ism itself. Tourism, as a prime manifestation of
social change, has the ability to act as a vehicle
for showing how visual discourses of leisure can
be located in 'the practices, politics, and poetics
of cultural and visual representation' (Schwartz
and Ryan, 2003, p. 4). There is no such thing as
unmediated tourism and certainly no possibility
of unmediated corporeal, digital or mechanical
images. It is no coincidence that photography
and tourism have, in many respects, a shared
chronology and history not only in respect of
their development over time, but also in the pat-
terns of commoditization, liquidity and com-
mon occurrence in post-industrial, postmodern
societies. By going someplace else to compare
ourselves with others, we re-affi rm our own
identity and in so doing take comfort in our
'search for happiness' (de Botton, 2002, p. 9).
This volume has a strong common core running
through it: tourism's visual culture. It brings
together a collection of cutting-edge method-
ological applications, innovations and original
empirical works to examine some important
implications for society through its engagement
with tourism.
In describing his fi rst foray into analysing
tourism via the gaze in early 1990, Urry makes
the point that he underestimated the growing
signifi cance of both globalization and in particu-
lar, the Internet (in its form as a global pheno-
menon). 'Indeed' he says, 'the Internet had only

just been invented and there was no indication
how it would transform countless aspects of
social life.' Picking up on Roland Robertson's
sociological take on globalization, Urry goes on
to say 'Overall the 1990s have seen remarkable
“time-space compression” as people across the
globe have been brought “closer” through vari-
ous technologically assisted developments.'
There is increasingly, for many social groups, a
'death of distance' (Cairncross, 1997), while
Bauman describes the shift from a heavy, solid
modernity to a much more fl uid and speeded-up
'liquid modernity' (2000). Both Cairncross's
and Bauman's concepts resonate through tour-
ism studies.
Tourism is an essentially visual experience:
we leave our homes to travel to see places, thus
adding to our stock of personal knowledge
about and experience of the world in the hope
of fi nding novelty, renewal or our authentic
selves in the company of like-minded others.
These social practices were contextualized and
developed by John Urry (2002), who took 'the
aestheticisation of consumption' (2002, p. 15)
as an overarching theme to consider the impor-
tance of tourism as both an agent and signifi er
of social change in a postmodern world.

The Rhetoric of the Image

In a discussion on the political ideology of aes-
thetic idealization, Bernard Edeleman describes
photographic images as a 'legal fi ction' (Mit-
chell, 2003, p. 57), while Kember (2003, p. 202)
expresses some angst over the photographic
realism 'Computer manipulated and simulated
imagery appears to threaten the truth status of
photography even though it has already been
undermined by decades of semiotic analysis.'
For any discussion on the visualities arising from
tourism and tourists, Kember makes a crucial
point about how photography mediates and
intervenes in an understanding of the world.
Walter Benjamin would recognize these argu-
ments as rooted in the Frankfurt School's con-
cern with 'the relation between public spheres
of debate and activity and the private, and also

2 These 'scapes are of course inspired by Appadurai's 1996 work on globalization.