ABSTRACT
Visual methods and materials, such as drawings, diaries, photographs and video footage, has proliferated in tourist studies recently. Visual representations produced by researchers and tourists provide rich and vivid sources for reading the ‘lives’ and practices of tourists. The proliferation of visual methods and materials raise the question of ‘reflexivity’. As visual anthropologist Pink (2003) argues, there is no ‘methodological fix’ to avoid reflexivity. ‘Reflexivity’ revolves around the idea that field accounts and readings are just as much an account of researchers’ gender, age, ethnicity and theoretical lenses as of the field and text/image. Reflexivity implies acknowledging that researcher and field or image/text are inevitably ‘entangled’ (Ateljevic et al. 2005) and mutually constitute each other in the production of ‘knowledge’. More broadly, ‘reflexivity’ emphasises situatedness, embodiment and context (see Feighey 2006 for a review of reflexivity within tourist studies).
