ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the dynamic interplay among tourist photographic practices, youth mobility and modernity. I begin with an examination of parallel trends in photography and tourism studies and a call to study the meanings of photographic images and tourism in contemporary Asian society. I then go on to consider tourist products, like photos and stories, as products of modernity. This is a socio-cultural study of the visual culture of tourism in a larger context of modernity rather than a study of the imperialism of Western tourist narratives. In Ong’s words, it seeks ‘to consider how nonWestern societies themselves make modernities after their own fashion, in the remaking of rationality, capitalism and the nation in ways that borrow from but also transform Western universalizing forms’ (1996: 64). Through emphasizing and unpacking the relationships of materiality in tourist productions, I believe we can gain a richer understanding of tourism practices and provide new ways to contextualize the relationships between travel and modernity in Asian societies. By looking more closely at the narratives contained within the travel photos of Asian young people, I seek to dissect their complex visual practices and their experiences of the meanings of Taiwanese modernity within a contemporary tourism context. The chapter also aims to call into question the complexity of Asian travel experiences and to investigate the role of travel photography as an agent of modernity. I argue that a clear understanding of youth travel requires an appreciation of a wider frame of social and cultural factors, including global influences and the technological development of photography and its link with the growth of mass tourism.
