Exercise - The Tourist Gaze

THE TOURIST GAZE 


The Tourist Gaze is a book about pleasure, holidays, tourism.  Discussing why people leave home for short periods of time, leaving their place of residence and workplace.  They consume goods and services which are unnecessary but pleasurable, which are different to what we normally have.

Part of the experience is to gaze upon a new landscape.  When we go away we look at the environment with interest and curiosity.  We gaze at what we encounter.  In the production of 'unnecessary' pleasure
there are professional experts who help to construct and develop our gaze as tourists.  There is no single gaze .. the gaze in any historical period is constructed in relation to its opposite.

Tourism seems a trivial subject for a book but it investigates the bizarre and idiosyncratic social practices which happen to be defined as deviant in some societies but not necessarily in others.
Practices involve the notion of departure, a limited breaking with establishment.

Tourism is a leisure activity which presupposes its opposite, regulated and organised work.  Tourist relationships arise from a movement of people to their various destinations.
The journey and where to stay are not the norm and you have  clear intention to return home.  The places gazed upon are for the purposes not directly connected with paid work.
A substantial proportion of the population engages in such practices.
Places are chosen to be gazed upon because of daydreaming and fantasy.  Film, TV, magazines all
reinforce the gaze.
The tourist gaze is directed to landscape away from your everyday experiences.  People linger over such a gaze which is then normally captured by a photograph, postcard, film and this enable this gaze to be reproduced and recaptured.
The gaze is constructed through signs, for example, 'timeless romantic Paris', Real Olde England, traditional pubs, traditional Italy etc ....
An array of tourist professionals develop who attempt to reproduce ever new object of the tourist gaze.

Travel is thought to occupy 40% of available free time in Britain.  Travel is the marker of status and good for peoples physical and mental health, getting away from time to time. 

Car ownership had permitted some increase in the number of domestic holidays taken in Britain, these were normally short in length. 

Shopping is also significant to tourism, both as an area for spending and as an incentive for travel.    

The tourist tries to seek and authenticity in other times and places.. away from their everyday life. 

We look for the opposite, the inversion of everyday that being a holiday.  The middle class tourist will seek to be a peasant for the day, whilst the lower middle class will want to be a king for the day. 

Satisfaction stems from anticipation , from imaginative pleasure- seeking.  Peoples basic motivation for consumption is not therefore simply materialistic.  It is rather that they seek to experience the reality of what they have in their imagination.  However since 'reality' rarely provides the perfected pleasures experienced in daydreams, each purchase leads to disillusionment and to the longing for ever new products.

GEOGRAPHIES OF TOURIST PHOTOGRAPHY - JONAS LARSEN 

Since its invention, photography has become associated with travelling.  The modern worlds lust for visuality and geographical movement accelerated with these inventions, Photography is very much a travelling phenomenon. It would be unthinkable to travel without your camera.
It is suggested that the nature of tourist photography is a complex theatrical one, actors and scripts.
As photos became easier to reproduce it then made the world more visible and desirable.  Tourism is one social practice shaped by the compulsive photographic culture of cameras and images.  Photographs offer evidence that the trip was made.  Tourism and photography became welded together and the development of each cannot be separated from the other.

The tourist gaze suggests that tourist places are produced and consumed through images and that gazing is constructed through and involves a collection of signs.  Urry suggests that photographic reproductions produce appetites for seeing places at their unique place of residence.
Tourist consume places visually through participating in a sign relation between markers and sight. A tourist may elect to get his thrills from the marker instead of the sight.

Tourism vision is increasingly media mediated.  Increasingly people travel to actual places to experience virtual places.  Major films and soap opera often cause a flow of tourist as the flee to the location of the show or film.
Tourist places are not fixed, they can appear, disappear, change meaning and character.  It is virtually impossible for western people to visit places that they have not travelled to imaginatively some time ago , if not many times.
Much tourism involves a hermeneutic circle.  What is sought for in a holiday is a set of photographic images, which have already been seen in tour company brochures or on TV. The tourist then tracks down the location and captures that image for oneself.  It ends up with travellers demonstrating that they have been there by showing their version of the images that they had seen before they set off.

People have learnt the importance and the pleasure of exhibiting themselves in a world in which the consciousness of ones constant visibility has never been more intense.  Family frictions are almost at once put on hold when the camera appears. Tourist photography simultaneously produces and displays the family closeness.  The proximity comes into existence because the camera event draws people together.  A proper family, relaxed and intimate.

Almost no matter how the image turned out on paper, every click of the shutter was destined for life long as material object.  However with digital photography unloved images can be quickly removed at no cost.  At present with camera phones, internet, etc.. images are transported instantly,  The new temporal order of tourist photography seems to be 'I am here' ... rather than 'I was here' ...







http://www.oca-student.com/sites/default/files/Larsen_Geographies.pdf

http://www.oca-student.com/sites/default/files/Urry_TouristGaze.pdf