ABSTRACT
Some time ago I was invited to present a paper at an international conference in Sheffield in the United kingdom. The title of this conference: Tourism and Photography: Still Visions, Changing Lives was to re-open for me a question which John Urry had announced about ten years earlier in his book The Tourist Gaze (1990). The expression ‘tourist gaze’ had immediately caught my attention when a copy of the book was given to me during a conference I co-convened in Nice, France in 1992 (Lanfant 1992). The terminology used was by then not new. The expression of the ‘regard touristique’ (imperfectly translated as the ‘tourist gaze’) had been circulating for a while in discussions. The research team at the French National centre for Scientific Research (cNRS) which I had directed between 1975 and 1997, had consistently discussed the issues which John Urry raised in his book notably; the theses by Boorstin on ‘pseudo-events’ (Boorstin 1961); de debord (1983) on the ‘society of spectacle’; Baudrillard (1972, 1981) on the political economy of the sign and; Maccannell (1976) on the structural semiotics of tourism.
