Tourism and Visual Culture - Term Paper Example

Running head: Tourism and Visual culture Student’s name Institution Course Professor Date Introduction There are two distinct cultural formations namely visual culture and tourism. There exist some diverse ways in which visual practices and representations have been associated in the rituals and experiences of tourism. Most historians and geographers argued that images have a crucial and formative function in the practices of tourism. The tourists do respond to the images that are in circulation that concerns their touristic destinations. The contemporary cultural identity has been enhanced with the interaction between tourism and visual culture. Literature review Theoretical platforms used in socio-cultural study of tourism The concept of gaze emphasized the visual nature of tourism. For instance, the way in which tourists can seek out and consume the visual images and also the means by which tourism industry organize and direct the consumption. In this concept, the sights consumed by tourists are normally selected, stage-managed and directed by the tourism industry (Urry, 1990). In order to appreciate views, tourists do take photographs or buy pictures postcards of every place they visit. Pleasure piers, hotel balconies, scenic viewpoints in national parks and extensive tourism media encompasses equipments and structures that can direct the tourist gaze. Participation of tourist in the provided gaze follows its lead during the structuring of space, the spectacle and culture. The language of views and panoramas recommended a specific visual structure of the experience The tourist gaze does not include images of waste, disease, poverty, sewage and despoilation (Urry, 2002). Photography is crucial to the construction of the tourist gaze and the overall development of tourism. Indeed photography allows the visual consumption of places and also produces social relations. The objects of tourism gaze ought to be unique and have particular tourism signs in order to be different from the experiences at home. Other features of those objects include; unfamiliar aspects of that which are familiar, ordinary aspects of life seen in unusual contexts, familiar tasks undertaken against unusual backgrounds (MacCannell, 1999). The concept of authenticity derives the quality of being ‘other’ to the tourists. The object of the gaze can be people, natural or built environment. The concept enables tourists to gaze at the local people having colourful national costume or performing out traditional rituals. The gaze can be experienced by tourist within varied social contexts such as individual or in crowds (Urry, 1990). Theoretical understandings to contemporary tourism issues The visual cultures of tourism contextualize representations, prioritize destinations, direct ways of seeing and provide points of departure for the tourist. Furthermore, it may constitute the site/sight itself as it was displayed in New York’s and Bilbao’s Gunnenheim museums and a Balinese festival (Urry, 1990). The visual spectacle was fundamental to the rituals of the modern tourism (MacCannell, 1999). Tourism is visually represented as physical and it involve spaces and visiting of concrete places. Alternatively, the visual culture can construct ideas and desires of the experiences of tourism and also of imagined places. Characteristics of an encounter may be triggered by particular visual images (Lash & Urry, 1994). However, an individual incorporate visual materials such as paintings, photographs, television images and brochures with other contextual elements during refiguring process. Visual culture gets implicated in the possibility of its temporary ownership. The tourism assumes the exchange of finance for temporary visual property especially when the visitors acquire the temporary rights to possess places away from home (Lash & Urry, 1994). Nonetheless, the visual culture may be deconstructed by either an artist or photographer from its original meaning and may be rendered completely different (Urry, 1990). Despite the challenges of prolonged stasis of the painter and previous photographic technologies, photography still accompanies and records contemporary mobility. The use of visual culture in tourism has become a cultural tourism process and also identity formation in the contemporary society (Baxandall, 1972). Baudrillard’s argument on the construction of desire attests that people do respond to their entire life through the available spectral seduction and the prefigured rules. Consequently, the process of aesthetic reflexivity encompasses self interpretation and interpretation of social background practices assist tourists to play with place myths and identities in their own entire lives. Wills (1990) and Fiske (1989) identified cultural materials as crucial resources that their use may subvert and redefined the prefigured meanings. Tourists can consume the available visual culture and produce their own in photographs. Though, their own material may not conform to the existing visual culture (Urry, 1997). The visual culture is deemed to be part of a mutually enriching encounter in a manifold circulation of artefacts and practices. The visual culture becomes more significant during practice and refiguring process than a completed object since identities can be felt, discovered and challenged. In other instances, visual culture can provide material that allows people to constitute their own metaphors since the visual culture of tourism can be refigured as materialist, subjective or embodied semiotics (Crouch, 2001; Game, 1991).Indeed both tourism and visual culture are viewed as processes of knowledge, identities and experiences. Visual culture can be produced during touring process that involves exploration, imagination and an exercise of identity. The use of picture postcards provides a linkage between tourism and visual culture (Schor, 1992). Photographs have been involved in the negotiation of culture, self and social exchange. Understanding of the key concepts in Tourism and visual culture Tourists are differentiated into three groups; travelers, trippers and tourists. They denote a hierarchy in touring (MacCannell, 1999). Travel and photography works to represent the experiences of nationhood in various states. However, tourism may encourage the structural underdevelopment since it is what tourists often seek. The landscape is an attribute of sight and site. It implies observation and separation which depicts differences of place and hierarchies in the social class. Again it is able to correspond to and reinforce the hierarchies of social class, gender and identity (Williams, 1975).Photographs had a source of authority since it confused the existing difference between reflections and reality. Thus able to transcribed and held the English view forever. Picturesque was utilized to reassure people that indeed England was as beautiful as ever. The communities are distinguished by the styles in which they are imagined. Moreover, picturesque had important consequence since it helped draw together competing class fractions into an imagined community of the nation. A common shared history was made distinct in photographs and a flow to social differences. The concept of deep horizontal comradeship was fundamental to marketing of photographic products in England. In tourism the signs that convey the values of products include brochures of destinations, films and recycling of artwork in various forms (Evans and Hall, 1999). Tourism is promoted as seduction process since many people are lured to go touring, enticed to specific cultures, sites and sights across the entire world by visual culture and agencies in the tourism sector. Normally people seek out signs and their power as part of the tourism, for example they gaze at the objects and their translation displayed in the signs (Urry, 2002). The power of gazing in the entire tourism (geographies and sociologies) relates to its ever engagement of tourism as a detached observer and consumer prioritizing signs. Tourism sight can be constructed with the use of visual culture by the producers of sites such as heritage or themed locations. Visuality can lend power to the tourist in regard to the scene, the place and the culture objectifies in the gaze due to the detaching, distancing and objectifying character (Urry, 1990).With the institutional deployment of visual culture becomes more diverse which produces a formal language of the visual. For instance, specific constructions of tourism places and desires via target depiction of temples accompanied myth deploying process which resonated with deep cultural meanings of landscapes and national identity (Selwyn, 1996). MacCannell (1999) acknowledged that tourist sites were signified as locations of the authentic where people could feel their entire lives authenticated. Indeed the baggage of visual culture is constructed to deliver what is authentic to the tourist. Concepts of authenticity, power and identity provide framework by making sense during cultural and physical relocation of the former Thames Bridge to the American desert. Visual culture is a rendered part of everyday aesthetisization. It can also be used to assert power over the tourist as part of contemporary culture regime. The constructed artefacts could be translated to commodities to be utilized for tourism. Through constructed recognition, the sightseers have the potential to recognize sights especially by transforming them into markers (MacCannell, 1999). Conclusion The concept of gaze emphasized the visual nature of tourism. The sights consumed by tourists are normally selected, stage-managed and directed by the tourism industry. Photography is crucial to the construction of the tourist gaze and the overall development of tourism since it allows the visual consumption of places and also produces social relations. The concept of authenticity derives the quality of being ‘other’ to the tourists. The visual cultures of tourism contextualize representations, prioritize destinations, direct ways of seeing and provide points of departure for the tourist. The contemporary cultural identity has been enhanced with the interaction between tourism and visual culture. Visual culture can provide material that allows people to constitute their own metaphors since the visual culture of tourism can be refigured as materialist, subjective or embodied semiotics. The use of photographs as a constructed form of visual culture is able to convey and reproduce the hegemony of the visual. Visual culture is generally suitable in the inscription of places for tourism. For instance, paintings can imply a power of visual culture in regard to the observer through its mastery of the scene. Read More