ABSTRACT
In the years that followed the introduction on the market of cheaper and easier to operate cameras, a debate emerged within photographic circles about their possible application to "the chief aim of the whole, viz., the promotion of photography as an art". In the context of travel and tourism, the moral judgement passed on the unruly practices of hand-camera users found in the long-standing debate between travellers and tourists a ground on which to argue for the recognition of one form of travel photography as worth pursuing. The presence of tourists with a camera had been noted in reports commenting on the Polytechnic tours from the early 1890s. Photographs held an important role in this project: as has been extensively documented, photographic views of the world were considered as an "engine of public instruction" in Victorian and then Edwardian Britain.
