The Performing Turn of Tourist Gaze
In 1990, Urry coined the “tourist gaze” concept as the important way tourists see.
“Tourist gaze” refers to how looking is a learned ability and that the pure and innocent eye is a myth (Urry and Larsen, 2011). The notion of gaze is about a visual sense of consuming and photographing places. Since the advent of postmodernism, the vision is
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related to the nature of human interaction and social life such as enacting, expressing, and being emotional and responsive. Then tourists perform through a pose, gestures, wink and much more.
Urry mentioned tourists are not only concerned about ‘consuming place’ or hegemonic ‘place-myths’ but also with self-presentation and strategic impression management. And here tourists are creating their impression management through the
In other instantaneous performances, tourists act, play and cooperate with the photographer to construct beautiful, elegant or even amusing images. Sometimes, they create an illusion in a photo, such as tourists holding up the Taj Mahal between the thumb and forefinger (Edensor, 1998).
Belk and Yeh (2011) also revealed that tourists want to take a photo and act like the photo in the postcard. They mentioned they will not find family and friends on postcards, so they remake the poses in touristic locations. Some of these actions are kind of “family gaze”.
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start to perform for that photographic moment.
Since the advent of mobile technology, tourists tried to make their gazing or performances happen through tools such as mobile phone and camera. Urry argued that photography becomes a medium for tourists to extend the gaze. Gazing has constructed what one has to go to see and capture on camera. And of course, here the photography becomes a tool to record moments, through which moment or experience can be converted into an image (Edensor, 1998). Through photography, the tourists have commemorated their travel experiences and their photos become “souvenirs” (read:
comes to French for “to remember) of the trip (Urry, 2011; Endesor, 1998; Belk and reproduce the same images. Within this circle of representation, tourists produce images then encourage another tourist to have a homogenous type of photos. acquired by Facebook in 2012. In April 2017, there were 700 million users and 400 million daily activities (Instagram press, 2017).
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contrast with other photo sharing platforms which have to go from camera to a computer then to the website, Instagram emerged in mobile phones and is also quick and easy to integrate with other platforms (Fallon, 2014).
In other words, Instagram offers a fast, beautiful and fun way to share photo life with friends and family. We can post many kinds of photos on Instagram leisurely and casually. Unlike the other social media photo sharing platform, Flickr, Manovich said that most Flickr users use high-quality photos and more professional photos to share, vice versa with Instagram which shares lower or general quality photos (Manovich, 2016).
Instagram has some distinct features that are particularly useful for us to easily find some related content. The features include hashtags, location tags, biography space, explore, Instagram-story and many more.
Figure 2.1 Instagram function: Explore, Instagram story, source: Instagram Press blog, 2017
Figure 2.2 Instagram function: hash-tag, geo-tag location, source: Instagram Press blog, 2017
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or “how I felt it looked” (Fallon, 2014).
Manovich and Tifentale (2016) call this situation “competitive photography”
which is a competition among Instagram users to make their photos more appealing. It is not a professional photography; it is also not a family photography. Vice versa, with the non-competitive photography, users post casual photos without caring about the number of “likes” or followers.
However, both types of photography record author’s experience over time.
Manovich and Tifentale (2016) argued Instagram user is a narrator using an Instagram platform to tell a story through images. Moreover, finding one’s own style is an important feature of competitive photography. Marwick (2015) gives an example of Hannah Pixie Snowdon, a tattoo artist with dark hair and big eyes who posts her artwork, tattoos – to inspire her followers and position herself as cutting-edge cool. Marwick noted people who have significant cultural capital as subcultural trendsetters are popular. Those are the example of the most popular stream that is directed by some
11 monument valley hashtag and seven amateur photographers. The tourists and photographers were asked what their motivation are and what they want to capture
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London, fish, and chips.
The other Instagram’s research is written by Nina Smit (2017). It also examines the relationship between tourists’ photography and tourism. Smit tried to find out the construction of @lovegreatbritain Instagram account through their content during the referendum of Britain which voted to leave the European Union. The research uses multimodal discourse analysis which combines critical discourse analysis and visual semiotic analysis. And it examines the ten most popular and ten least popular photos, hashtags and caption to find the answer. The result shows Britain’s image is a city with history, heritage, and nature for tourists. Most of the photos were taken on England, with only five photos of Scottish location and no photos of Wales.
However, there are many studies that focused on the narration of place rather than tourist performance. As mentioned before, now tourists are busier performing rather than gazing because they have to show their performances through photography.
Endesor (1998) reveals that tourists said: “the Taj is amazing but boring, come on, let’s do the photo so we can get outta here”. Tourists are becoming active performers.
Moreover, the Dinhopl and Gretzel (2016) research said the presence of selfie made the self the object and focused on the photography than the place or other tourists’ attraction.
Specifically, the research wants to illustrate how tourists become players in the game of directed viewing and create, produce and circulate some featured gesture/ pose (Dinhopl and Gretzel, 2016). In the end, performances play and give a meaning to the ways that we enact ourselves, individually and collectively and reproduce social formation and norms. The performances allow tourists to make new narratives of their own travel.
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