Tourism and Visual Culture

Abstract

The relationship between tourism and visual culture has been an intimate, interdependent and ever-evolving one from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. Over this period, tourist visual culture played a vital role in organizing, and conventionalizing, specifically modern (and now-global) ways of seeing, and of representing the seen. This is evident, for example, in the development and elaboration of discourses of the picturesque, which invested specific landscapes and sites with visual, emotional, and experiential qualities and criteria of value. Tourist visual culture was also essential to the production of colonial knowledge and difference, contributing both to the making of empire and also its unmaking. A now-global tourist industry remains instrumental in the production and dissemination of destination imagery and place myths, though actual and potential tourists themselves play a greater role as “coproducers” of the tourist image.