The Family Gaze

Abstract

Despite the fact that taking photographs is an emblematic tourist practiceand that tourist studies have been dominated by a visual paradigm of gazing, littlesustained research has explored the general connections between tourism andpopular photography. We have virtually no knowledge of why and how touristsproduce photographic images. This article reframes the study of visual culture bystressing the sociality, reflexivity and embodied performances of tourist photography.Instead of portraying the shooting gazer as a disembodied and passive spectator, weview tourist photography as a theatre of life where people in concert perform places,scripts and roles to and for themselves. Whereas existing literatures ‘write out’tourists and their actual practices, interpretations and emotions, tourists’ ownphotographic images and the meanings and desires that tourists inscribe and ascribeto such productions are explored. The analyses show that much tourist photographyrevolves around producing social relations rather than ‘consuming places’. We bringthe performing family into tourist studies through the notion of the ‘the family gaze’that captures how family photography practices are socially organized andsystematized. Rather than being directed at extraordinary ‘material worlds’, the‘family gaze’ is concerned with the ‘extraordinary ordinariness’ of intimate ‘socialworlds’.