Revealing the unseen: Tourism, art and photography

Contemporary cultural criticism is increasingly recognizing the central place that tourism occupies in organizing interactions, both economic and social, between different peoples in the world today. In this paper, I take up the question of what role photography plays in determining the nature of touristic experience. By drawing on Martin Heidegger's account of modernity as the epoch of modern technology, I seek to articulate an understanding of touristic photography that goes beyond conventional critiques of its objectifying character and tendency to conform to predetermined semiotic markers. Instead, by considering the examples of the photographing of local peoples, and of attempts to photograph what I refer to 'the unphotographable sight', I develop an alternative perspective on both the dangers and the epistemic possibilities of touristic photography. Such a perspective, it is argued, allows us to move beyond the identification of photographs with the ocularcentric discourses of Western modernity and towards a consideration of the possibilities of touristic photographs as art. By foregrounding the role of photographic images in the production of memory and self identity, it is suggested that tourism can be understood in terms of what Michel Foucault refers to as the creation of one's life as a work of art. Finally, I argue that by attending to the limits of touristic photography, the potential to develop a new way of seeing may be fostered.