ABSTRACT
Academic interest in tourism, visual culture and photography has grown in recently years. For example, Richard chalfen’s work (1979), in which he approaches the unexplored connections between photography and tourism, gives some examples of various anthropological attitudes towards tourists’ ‘shooting’ the subjects and objects of the host culture to remind us of the issue of appropriate camera use by tourists. In a similar fashion, Albert and James offer a useful systematic methodological approach for examining the relationships between photography and tourism (1988: 134-158). In their research on travel photography, they acknowledge that one of the tourist acts is, for some tourists, to take photographs
exactly like those of postcards or advertising brochures. They argue that photographs like postcards provide a medium through which an effectively grounded aesthetic can be shown and enable personal experiences to be shared. It is important to note that the accessibility and mobility of a camera makes photography and tourism inseparable. Martin Parr (1995) provides many examples of such ‘inseparability’ between the tourist and the photographic act, which has become another of the ‘photographic’ sights that attracts the lens of both tourists and professional photographers. Kevin Markwell comments on this phenomenon of photographic practices, suggesting that to be a tourist ‘is to be, almost by necessity, a photographer’ (1997: 131). It can be argued if the act of photographing can be seen as an identifiable marker of being a tourist, it can also be used to make a distinction of such labelling by rejecting of the act. Not all tourists take photographs. Some ‘travellers’, especially, avoid showing their cameras so they are able to perform a ‘non-tourist’ behaviour and distinguish themselves from mass tourists. However, what is significant about this ‘non-tourist’ act is the very distinctive conception of the camera as a maker of tourist identity.
