Introduction - Tourism and Visual Culture: Theories and Concepts - page 6

explored in Maria Cardeira da Silva's anthro-
pological perspective of the Mauritanian desert
region of Adrar. 'Spontaneous' museums, guest
books, placards and photographs are analysed
for what they reveal about the tourists' search
for cultural knowledge and meaning.
The cultural knowledge supporting the rise
of the culinary travelogue provides the context
for David Dunn's chapter illustrating the ways
in which television employs visual stimuli to
authenticate and validate the gastronomic jour-
ney. By drawing upon the work of British Chefs
such as Elizabeth David, Jamie Oliver and Rick
Stein, Dunn reveals how the lingering gaze of
the camera stimulates both taste and tastes, and
in so doing inspires the culinary aspirations of
the viewer. For the fi nal chapter, television gives
way to fi lm as Les Roberts explores the cine-
matic geographies mapped in the British
director Alex Cox's 1988 fi lm about the English
city of Liverpool entitled Three Businessmen.
Taking the form of a travelogue or odyssey,
Robert's argues that the fi lm reveals the con-
tested geographies of tourism, global capital
and culture-led regeneration.

What emerge as important themes in the
conceptualization of tourism and visuality are
nostalgia, the ways in which photographic images
act as a mediating element in prefi guring per-
ceptions, the sentimentality of landscapes, the
conception and use of space (i.e. space as a social
construct), and the negative consequences of the
tourist gaze. As these themes show, the digital,
corporeal, virtual and conceptual visual land-
scapes created through tourism in all its guises
have brought profound change to all aspects of
the human condition. The importance and versa-
tility of 'reading' tourism through the tourist lens
will add signifi cantly to our understanding of tour-
ism as a force in changing both familiar and previ-
ously remote and unreachable spaces of what in
tourism studies are referred to as 'destinations'
(though others may refer to the same spaces as
'home' or even 'away'). Simplistic views of desti-
nations as a collection of attractions, modes of
transport and varieties of experience have been
swept aside as tourism, tourists and their gaze cre-
ate the need to rethink the concepts and social
frameworks used to observe and narrate human
experience and history.

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