Chapter 14 Geographies of Tourist Photography Choreographies

Tourism and photography are modern twins. Since its early invention, pho-tography has become associated with travelling. At a time when steamships and railways made the world physically more within reach, photographs made it visually at hand. Photographers travelled to faraway places, photography soon became a ritual practice of tourism and photographic objects roamed the globe, which, in turn, engendered a train of ideas, objects, places, cultures and people. The modern world’s lust for visuality and geographical movement accelerated tremendously with these inventions; by working together they caused a profound multiplication of images and sights, an unprecedented geographical extension of the field of the visible. Photography is very much a travelling phenomenon – a constitutive part of modernity’s travelling cul-tures. Contemporary tourism is intrinsically constructed culturally, socially and materially through images and performances of photography, and vice versa. The tourism industry invests enormously in photographic images to choreo-graph desirable “place myths”, desiring bodies and photogenic places, and it has become almost unthinkable to embark on holiday without taking the camera along, writing postcards and returning home with many snapshot memories. We know that we are reproducing a cliché, but photography performances are pleasurable and our holiday photos that celebrate the world’s famous places, our achievements and personal relationships are precious belongings. This chapter explores the roles of photography in tourism and how photo-graphy and place intersect in tourism. It is an introduction to how tourism photography has been studied across tourism studies as well as sociology, geography and cultural studies. It is particularly concerned with examining how the relationships between cameras, images, places and tourists are portrayed. How does photography mediate tourists ’ experiences of places and produce tourist geographies? How is modern tourism shaped by modern image cultures and what are the connections between tourism studies and media studies