Seeing the Sites: Tourism as Perceptual Experience - Tourism and Visual Culture: Theories and Concepts - page 175

can 'know' what is 'real'. But the signifi cance of
such an analytical move is that it allows the
focus of study to become how the relationship
between 'mind' and 'reality' is not, for most
people, some philosophical issue but a rather a
practical sociological construction as they go
about the business of constituting tourism as a
certain kind of sightseeing activity. Much has
been written recently about the discursive
means by which people construct such an asso-
ciation (e.g. Edwards and Potter, 1992; Potter,
1996 ; Edwards, 1997) but there is much less of
a discussion as to how this is accomplished
through visual means as part of what constitutes
tourism. The upshot of this kind of construction
is that it is built around a certain notion of what
the tourist 'experience' is about in terms of
sightseeing.
This is what I wish to concentrate upon in
the remainder of this chapter. In doing so, I wish
to draw attention to two ways in which this is
accomplished (a visual metaphor which shows
how we routinely make use of the inner/outer
dualism). One kind of move involves the use of
visual rhetoric as a means of persuasion, as a
'reality-fi xing' practice associated with a mental
world of 'belief'. The other works in the oppo-
site direction and involves the establishment of
a person's state of 'mind' by the visual presenta-
tion of some aspect of their actions.

This process therefore involves constituting and
labelling a phenomenon, which is then placed
prior to this process as an already-existing
feature of the world.
But whilst this form of constituting facts is
the stock-in-trade of scientifi c practice, it is also
a major part of the modus operandi of the tour-
ist industry. Tourist guides and brochures com-
monly use visual images to establish the nature
of places and sites of interest. The assumption is
that people will employ their 'mental processes'
to operate upon this material in order to 'under-
stand' these places prior to visiting them. In this
way, tourist sites are placed prior to this opera-
tion, as being a certain way and needing to be
part of a sightseeing itinerary. In this communi-
cation model, there is a realm of places and
tourist sites and a realm of mental operations
requiring to be brought together. Photographic
images are taken as enhancing this process,
helping the reader to apprehend or grasp the
nature of these sites. In this way the selection
and active constitution of tourism as a social
practice is occluded through the reifi cation of
'reality' and 'mind', through the 'external' world
of place that needs to be 'understood' by an
inner mental processing system that 'perceives'
that outer reality. It also creates a version of
temporality in which the tourist destination
becomes historically reifi ed as something that
has to be seen in a particular way.
Nowhere more apparent is this association
between visual presentation and mental opera-
tion than photographs that are presented of
'must-see' emblematic sights. These are often
associated with a mythology associated with
'inner' states such appreciation, wonder and
awe. The accompanying text constructs these
must-see sights as being of critical importance
to being a tourist in these regions. However,
some photographs may be used to stimulate
sympathy, sadness or even a sense of outrage
with respect to some sites that tourist should see
(e.g. cemeteries, concentration camps, etc.).
These sights are again presented as emblematic
tourist destinations.
In this way, the visual and discursive are
intertwined to maintain the old adage that a
'picture speaks a thousand words', that a photo-
graphic image provokes an active 'inner'
response of imagination, of being a tourist at a
given locale. Here then the use of photographs

Making Tourist Destinations
Visual Encounters

Let us take the fi rst of these then, the means by
which making something visual is presented as
a way of constituting its existence in a particular
way and that it should be 'believed' to be so.
Within the sociology of scientifi c knowledge,
there have been a number of studies (e.g. Lynch
and Woolgar, 1990; Goodwin, 1995) of the
ways in which much of scientifi c practice
involves observation and the visual constitution
of 'facts'. For example, in biology, scientists may
present evidence in terms of images obtained
from microscope slides as indicative of a par-
ticular pattern of say bacterial growth. In this
way, 'growth' is constituted a biological phe-
nomenon but of course there is nothing that
is pre-conceptual or pre-discursive about this.