1. Exercise: The Tourist Gaze
Read the first chapter of The Tourist Gaze. Core resources: Urry_TouristGaze.pdf Write a 200-word reflective commentary in your learning log about its relevance to documentary photography. (Open College of the Arts, 2014:67)
We were also directed to read Geographies of Tourist Photography (Larsen 2006). Here Larsen explores the roles of photography in tourism and how in tourism photography and place intersect; he asks how photography mediates tourism.
In His chapter in “The Tourist Gaze” Sociologist John Urry explores the image mediated way of seeing, as well as the imaginative views of tourist landscapes; he dates the birth of the “tourist gaze” to the same year that photography was invented (1839-1841). Urry calls the use of mobile photography, imaginative mobility, where these images become more important that the sight itself; indeed Larsen says that geographers now see photography as “world making”. It is certainly true that people go to locations to experience virtual places that have been idealised; in fact Larsen goes so far as to say that Tourist photography creates new realities.
I am particularly interested how Urry breaks down how the Tourist gaze is constructed:
- Through anticipation and fantasy
- Through signs
- Directed towards landscape and townscape features
Though he questions the authenticity and the fickleness of the Tourist gaze.
He marks the Tourist gaze out as where there is a division between the ordinary/everyday and the extraordinary involving:
- A unique object
- Particular signs
- Unfamiliar aspects
- Ordinary aspects being undertaken by people in unusual contexts
- Familiar tasks or activities in unusual visual environment
- Seeing signs that indicate an ordinary object is in fact extraordinary
- Day -dreaming or anticipation of different experiences
The Tourist Gaze is certainly relevant to documentary photography. Only by analysing the different components can images be directed towards to their intended audiences; these same elements could also form a list of what make a documentary image arresting. It may be that a documentary photograph is of something that is everyday or ordinary but interest is unlikely to be aroused in the image unless there is something that makes it extraordinary.
It is also important that when making documentary images that they are different from the idealised tourist mediated expectations of a place.; this is unlikely as documentary photographs ae usually founded on research and are likely to have a distinctive style and message.
My learning:
I’d not thought before about the tourist gaze, imaginative mobility, or that these images might create new realities. Its also been useful to me to breakdown that the tourist gaze is when there is a unique object, particular signs, unfamiliar aspects or contexts or anticipation of an experience. I wonder how this will apply to my assignment 3? Have I the tourist or photographer’s gaze?
References:
Larsen, J. (2006) Geographies of Tourist Photography in Falkheimer & Jansson, 2006, Chapter14 p.241-257)At: https://www.oca-student.com/sites/default/files/Larsen_Geographies.pdf (accessed 19.8.20).
Open College of the Arts (2014) Photography 2: Documentary-Fact and Fiction (Course Manual). Barnsley: Open College of the Arts.
Urry TouristGaze (2020) At: https://www.scribd.com/doc/108707270/Urry-TouristGaze?secret_password=tyvwrzrv2x061r6vhsz (Accessed 22/08/2020).
Photography 2: Documentary 