ABSTRACT
John Urry was always ahead of everybody else in discovering new and exciting research fields; The Tourist Gaze is an early example of this. Prior to this book, few sociologists had taken tourism seriously or noted its growing significance around the world. The Tourist Gaze made Urry a world-famous tourism scholar and the book quickly became a seminal text. It is John’s ‘best-selling book and more or less most cited book’. The Tourist Gaze is essentially an account of how modern tourism became organized around a core set of new institutions, ideologies and practices, and not least how vision and new visual technologies such as photography produced new and exciting ways of looking at and visually appreciating landscapes and architecture as aesthetically pleasing and spectacular. Tourism became materially and discursively designed as a ‘way of seeing’ and this mirrors the general Western preference towards vision, as discussed by Michel Foucault and others.
