ABSTRACT
This chapter articulates how tourist photography as staged performance facilitates the imaginary of the tourist self. By revealing the how and why of online travel image inclusion and exclusion by Hong Kong Chinese tourists, existing conceptualizations of tourist imaginaries are extended. It discusses on the imaginary of the tourist self would be incomplete without referencing Lacan's articulation of the imaginary. Lacan proposes a framework of three registers that explains the formation of the sense of self, otherness, and the world. The chapter also discusses feedback from participants at the Tourism Imaginary Conference hosted in February 2011 and from participants in Professor Graburn's Anthropology seminar 'Tourism, Art and Modernity', both at the University of California Berkeley, as well as invaluable suggestions from Prof. Dean MacCannell. The initial ideas were then expanded and modified largely online tourist photography is a performance of self through which an imaginary of self through the eyes of others is possible.
