ABSTRACT
Introduction In the last chapter we followed in the footsteps of tourists, ethnographically exploring various tourist scenes and performances in Turkey and Egypt. In this chapter we make a detailed ethnography of one emblematic tourist performance – photography – at tourist attractions in Turkey. Photographing is an emblematic tourism performance and yet little research has explored why and how tourists do photography. In Bærenholdt et al. (2004) we carried out what appears to be the first ethnography of how tourists do photography while sight-seeing at an attraction. Yet we did not discuss in any theoretical detail how we could understand photography as performance, and the rich ethnography in that book is to some extent obsolete since it is a study of how tourists photograph with analogue cameras. This chapter, then, theorizes photography as performance and provides a detailed, visual ethnography of digital photography performed at the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia and Topkapı Castle Museum in Istanbul and around the castle ruin in Alanya, Turkey.
