Performances of Photography
In most writing, tourist photography comprises artful photographers, tour-ing images and pre-programmed tourists (on the following, see Larsen 2005). The metaphor of the “vicious hermeneutic circle” is paradigmatically em-ployed to illustrate the choreographed nature of actual photographic sight-seeing (Albers and James 1988; Osborne 2000; Schroeder 2002; Jenkins 2003). In Urry’s words: Much tourism involves a hermeneutic circle. What is sought for in a holiday is a set of photography images, which have already been seen in tour com-pany brochures or on TV programmes. While the tourist is away, this then moves on to a tracking down and capturing of those images for oneself. And it ends up with travellers demonstrating that they really have been there by showing their version of the images that they had seen before they set off (2002: 129).
Thus, effectively, people travel in order to see and photograph what they have already consumed in image form: thus, mobile reproductions are far more important than the sight itself that, in turn, is reduced to nothing but (another) picture. To cite Osborne:
In tourism the distance between the promotion and the promotion’s object has been all but abolished. With photography and photographic seeing as prime commodity forms in tourism, the photographic image that promotes it is in many instances the very item consumed – the advertisement has become its own commodity (2000: 84).
The “vicious hermeneutic circle” thus captures the idea that sightseeing is about consuming signs or markers. This model essentially portrays commercial pho-tography as all-powerful machinery that turns the photographic performances of tourists into a ritual of quotation by which tourists are framed and fixed rather than framing and exploring (see Osborne 2000: 81). Being apparently too automatic and too instantaneous, it is not regarded as a performance as is dance, walking, painting and so on; it is pre-formed rather than performed. It renders an image of tourist photography as an over-determined stage that permits no space for creativity, self-expression or the unexpected. Such mod-els “rapidly pacify the tourist – that is they tend to experience, perceive and receive but not do” (Crang 1999: 238). This explains the many studies of com-mercial images2 and the neglect of photography performances enacted, and the images produced, by tourists themselves3. Tourist studies have predomi-nately been preoccupied with ‘dead’ images, thus excluding from analysis the lively social practices producing tourism’s sign economy. A too-fixed focus on already produced images and already inscribed sights and places render thetourist a passive sightseer– “all eyes, no bodies” – consuming sights in pre-scribed fashions and places become lifeless, predetermined and purely cul-tural. Analysing photographs “without looking for practices can only produce a mortuary geography drained of the actual life that inhabits these places” (Crang 1999: 249). Implicitly at least, too often real places and their images, media and tourism experiences are conflated with the result that tourist places are dematerialised and tourists are disembodied. Writings on tourist photography have produced lifeless tourists, eventless events and dead geographies.
Edward Said once briefly observed that “the very idea of representation is a theatrical one” (1995: 63). The “vicious hermeneutic circle” obscures the fact