Tourism,

Experience and Photographs: Mapping the Tourist Practices Through Experience Anglica Piedrahita MFA Candidate, SUNY University at Buffalo. Author Note Anglica Piedrahita, Visual Artist. Javeriana University. Bogot, Colombia. aypiedra@buffalo.edu.co

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2 Abstract

This paper explores tourist practices by means of an experiential approach confronted with a semiotic construction of a place. It traces tourist perceptual cognition in parallel to hegemonic and established signs, and sets photographic practice as one way in which the space is explored and narrated. By studying the work of Yan Fu Tuan, Merleu Ponty and Michel de Certau , the paper tries to set a discursive line where the tourism theories of Jhon Urry, Peter Osborne and Mike Crang could encounter a phenomenological detour. Keywords: tourism, photography, semiotics, perception.

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Tourism, Experience and Photographs: Mapping Tourist Practices Through Experience In The Cruise1, Timothy 'Speed' Levitch, a tour guide from Manhattan's Gray Line double-decker buses, shows to the passengers a New York saturated with historical facts and cultural references intertwined with his taste and perception of the city. The film portrays Levitchs life and the citys history as one inseparable figure where an image of the city is framed by Levitchs sensitivity and knowledge of it, at the same time as, Levitchs identity is framed in the citys dynamics and history. He is an authentic New Yorker, who show the tourists places packed with stories and references to New Yorkers that have been building, a pretty complex set of American cultural and social interests. Levitchs narration is mapping the city and making an impact in the experience of each passenger. His narration has become an important part of their experience; indeed, meeting him is an experience of the city itself. Tourists acknowledge a city, as an undefined connection between their previous ideas of the place, their own experience of being in it and the way tours, maps and guides set an itinerary. Furthermore, tourists are individuals who are living a non-daily experience and perceiving a space for the first time (maybe the only one), finding in photography, video, postcards and souvenirs a way to recall that experience in the future. Tourists are involved in a continuous transaction between senses, meanings and memories mediated by photography, maps, tours and tons of previous images of a place. For Jhon Urry, Tourists are semioticians, reading the landscape for signifiers of certain pre-established notions of signs derived from various discourses of travel and tourism (Urry, 1990). They classify, decode, and encode experiences and representations of a
1 A documentary film directed by Bennett Miller in 1998

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space as they also communicate them socially. As tourists, we are immersed in a kind of loop of signs where we preview an imaginary place before actually visiting it, read the space through a map of iconic landscapes and places, experience the space with our own body, capture a sight with a camera, and later we trigger these images of icons mixed with our own experiences into another narration of that space. A place is considered touristic in the moment in which there is an attraction for a

place that works within the economic machinery called tourism industry. There are different reasons that explain why a place can be attractive as there are places that are attractive to certain individuals. The reason for a place being a touristic attraction depends on specific and diverse interests. However, tourism is about producing destinations (Crang, 2011); it is a tangible capitalization of space as an idea. An idealization of nature feeds an interest for ecotourism as an idealization for excitement encourage an interest for amusement parks, adventurous tours and even sex and drug tourism. That is why there is a vast diversity of tourist attractions and none of those is less constructed in relation to an idea than the other. For Henry Lefebvre, the physical, mental, and social spaces are set together in something that he calls unitary theory. For Lefebvre an overlap between an ideal space involving mental categories and a real space involving social practice is what constitutes the space. So when Mike Crang talks about tourism as a production of destinations we cannot solely think about a physical and ideal place built for people to go. We must also think about the social production of that space that made it a capitalized destiny. Niagara Falls, the Eiffel Tower, New York and tons of different places that are attractive to tourists are appealing because of theirs physical characteristics, the ideas around it, and also the social transaction of meanings and

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experiences on the site. Lefebvre emphasizes in the dialectic character of code construction that involves social practices in the production of the meaning of space (Lefebvre, 1991). For this reason it is difficult to talk about ideas like nature and excitement as abstract and unrelated to the place; there are complex set of ideas, perceptions and memories that build the attractiveness. Before I go further, I would like to make a brief distinction between the terms traveler and tourist for practical matters. There is a thin line between a traveler and a tourist, a line that can be drawn regarding the tourism business structure, the length of the trip, purposes and so on. However, the word tourism comes from tour which relates to a circular journey that begins at one point and ends at this same point. Travel, on the other hand, is related to a movement from one place to another. Tour as travel entails movement, however it is the way the moving is set as a circuit in tourism that is an important difference here. Tourists are definitely travelers too, but travelers can be or not be tourists depending on the way they set their journey. Furthermore my interest in defining them goes beyond dissecting the terms to their minimal expression, but showing that both individuals are involved in an akin transaction of signs. Both have a previous idea of the place, both get through the space using maps, guides or certain kind of directions that assist them through the space. Both of course have their own unique sensitive experience of the place, but both may or may not have a camera for registering the space. However, they do play an important part in telling others their own experience and being part of the social construction of that specific place. At the end of this straightforward analysis of tourists, their practices and the capitalization of destinies there is still a question regarding to what resides outside of the structure of representations that we, as social entities, are immerse. For Peter

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Osborne, if nothing lies outside of tourism system of representations then the true object of tourism must be tourism itself. He frames tourism in a modulation between the hope for the encounter with singular authenticity and the actual immersion in a plurality of representations (Osborne, 2000). This statement leads us to a deconstruction of tourism structure of signification that only looks at concepts inside semiotics. Nothing exists outside the sign within this Derridean discourse, in which for Jacques Derrida, language consists of a surplus of signification, which is an "overabundance of the signifier" that supplements its own "lack" and in this way language does not directly reflect reality but rather constructs it (Derrida, 1978). Is not my intention to fight with the veracity of this discourse, due to the fact that language does construct reality. However, tourist is not just an empty label that we can wholly define, a tourist is also a person that is immersed in modernity, uses certain technologies and defines herself/himself in a business structure of travel. What's travel and what good is it? Any sunset is the sunset; one doesn't have to go to Constantinople to see it. The sensation of freedom that travel brings? I can have it by going from Lisbon to Benfica, and have it more intensely than one who goes from Lisbon to China, because if freedom isn't in me, then I won't have it no matter where I go. (Pessoa) You can have a previous idea of a destination, full of details, images and stories that come from the experience of others, but you are never going to know how is the process of that idea turning into real. You can never tell how the passing of your body through the space is going to change that idea. A totally different experience of the place resides in each individual depending on their personal experiences, gender, culture,

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social class, skills and so on. Even thought they are sited in the same double-decker bus in which Timothy Levitch is the tour guide. For Yin-Fu Tuan, experience is conformed of feelings and thoughts, a combination between objectivity and subjectivity that relates experience with knowledge (Tuan, 1977). You can only know a place by being there, the previous image acquires a concreteness that is only yours no matter how set, fixed, arranged, and premeditated is the landscape to offer you a experience; no matter how many people go to Disneyland each experience and acknowledge of the amusement park is individual. Furthermore, is not only about a sensitive body that process inputs by means of its characteristics, neither is a solely experience related to identity. Elements coexisting in a place may be distinct and singular, but that does not prevent us from thinking either about interrelations or about the shared identity conferred on them by their common occupancy of the place (Aug, 1995). There are spatial and temporal relations that create connections between every object and subject that coexists in the space, and that is why meeting Timothy 'Speed' Levitch, the tour guide in New York is an experience of the city itself. He is a New Yorker, an experienced local narrating the space to an outsider. For Urry (1990) the relations: local vs outsider, work vs leisure, and work vs vacation are fundamental to determine tourism. Through the experience of the local the tourist avoids feeling lost. Tourists as travelers ask for directions and advice, relying on the local knowledge of the space. It is the local, who arrange maps, set a hierarchy of places and itineraries, fix and design the sight, and have economic revenues from the comfort of the outsider. Each one learns about space and each other through this interaction, as romantic as it might sound this is a moment when each individual is

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aware of differences and similarities related to body and territory. Aug states that a frontier is not a wall but a threshold, when he says that the notion of frontiers marks the minimal and necessary distance that ought to exist between individuals to make them free to communicate with each other (Aug, 1995). I am not saying that just asking for directions, locals and outsiders learn deeply about each other, that is an excessively simplistic way to understand a cultural encounter. However, by recognizing the inhabitants of a place we can learn more about it and how it is set. For Tuan, at first the triangle is just space, a blurred image, but by recognizing its corners, it turns into a place (Tuan, 1977). In this context a destination as an idea is a space, a diffused image solely constructed by others mediated experience. In Lefebvres terms, recognizing the mental, social, and physical space is what allows us to be acquainted with a place. For Tuan a place achieves concrete reality when we have a total experience. In that sense, with our previous idea of the space, a physical perception of it and recognition of the people that inhabit it, we achieve a concrete reality of a place. And that experience is achieved through all the senses as well as with an active and reflective mind. However Tuan also replies that, long residence enables us to know a place intimately, its image may lack sharpness unless we can also see it from the outside and reflect upon our experience (Tuan, 1977) stating that also a resident being immerse in his everyday life can miss the concreteness of the place and forget about its corners. Merleu Ponty (1969), in order to explain the impossibility of separating an inner self and an outer world in the well supposed dichotomy imaginary and real, argues that a body that sees and moves is part of the things that exists in the world, another one that belongs to the knit. In that sense, space is not an exterior wrapping, because I live inside of it. After all is around me and not in front of me (Ponty, 1969).

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Nevertheless, my body performs as thinks, thus I live in the world within other objects and subjects while thinking about it. Tourism is not just about a semiotic exchange that happens in the tourist mind. Tourists are bodies in time, beyond that, are bodies in leisure time. Today capitalism engages us into a logic of production in which is difficult to escape, thus to say that vacations and leisure time can not be understand outside of the work hours and off course the exchange value of your work hours. The infrastructure of tourism is set in order to fit into this tight schedule that tries to compile more in less: more adventures in less days, more days for less money; more commodities for cheaper price and so on. As machines of production, turned into the infinite play of labor, we try desperately to run outside our place of work to look whatever we can not find there and at the same time making profitable our reduced time of leisure into a settled machinery of entertainment. But, what is the purpose of photography in the touristic experience? Why is not a so common activity taking pictures of our daily routines? Let me first talk about photography and its practice in terms of media studies and tourism studies, in order to clarify the relation between experience and photography. It is common in our every day speech to refer to the practice of taking pictures as capturing. For Urry (1990), Osborne (2000), Mac Cannel (1976) and other tourist theorists, photography in travelling is just a matter of taking back the meanings of the place to tourists own realm (Osborne, 2000). Leaving its performance as a plain semiotic act in which the photographs nourish the already heavy flow of meanings of the space. Osborne refers to this practice as one in which tourists absorb the places cultural energy. Stating that tourists photographic framing extracts the place from its own history and context. Osborne continues his ideas saying that, as tourists we seek authenticity somehow precedent to

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all representations and then take pictures of it as lapsing back into the realm of image (2000). Furthermore, photography is also well known as a device of memory in which we try to maintain a moment that is already dead (Sontag, 1977). For Susan Sontag, it promotes nostalgia for a time that is not anymore and also promises the democratization of all the experiences turning them into images and consequently, destroying experience. Is not my job to just turn down all this statements because in fact they are true. I take pictures of my time in Paris because I might not be there again, but I do not take pictures of my computer, my pen at work nor my boss shouting at me. There is indeed an idealization of the photographic image and in tourism it triggers memories as it proves an event. However, photographing is an experience itself, it sets a relation with objects different to the relation we establish without the camera, but one doesnt abolish the other. Looking through a viewfinder also sets a relation between my understanding of the object and the object itself, as an unusual moment of relative intimate co-presence (Haldrup, Larse, 2006). Michael Haldrup and Jonas Larsen understand photography as a hybrid performance in which photographers, objects, technologies, scripts and practice work together. In their perspective is not solely a technological object or discursive practice, but a hybrid in which a body acts. Photographing is as much a way of seeing as a way of acting and approaching to a subject or object. We have to take into account the resulting static image as the act of photographing. My point here is not glorifying photography but to understand that it is also an action that intends to join an embodied experience, an inner view, and an awareness of the incapability to preserve experience. Merleu Ponty (1969) approaches this phenomena by analyzing painting. He says that is borrowing his body to the world that

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the painter change the world into painting, and to understand this transmutations we need to understand the performing body in the actual place, because is through vision and movement that the painter tries to converge the visible and the invisible; a relation between inner and outer, where the inner is affected and resides in the outer and by the same token the outer is comprehend by the inner (Ponty, 1969). Although, Ponty does not see transmutations in photography due to its simultaneity and the disparity in the amount of movement in the body of a painter compared to a photographer. However, there is an embodied performance in photographing, a physical relation between the camera and the photographer, as well as a relation between the physical photograph and the one who remembers the dead moment. Until now I said that being in a place is what let you have a perceptive cognition of it, no matter how much previous images of a place you have. Which is not merely built by a corporeal perception because we are bodies that think and live in social spaces. Cognition is established by your body and mind in relation with other subjects and objects you correlate within the space. In this panorama you might or might not use photography as a practice. Nevertheless, using it and here is when I bring my last point around this subject, is also another practice of the space, a different one that is of course mediated. And the resulting object of this practice are images that cannot reach the state of experience, and as words they are signs that fight with their own emptiness if seen alone, outside of context, outside of experience, or as abstract entities. In spite of this, photography as a practice is a way of dissecting, fragmenting and setting the landscape in front of us. Isolating frames of its wholeness in order to make contact with a portion of it, relating objects with subjects, comparing micro and macro structures, matching colors and so on. Is indeed a mere visual practice. Michel De Certau, compare

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the action of walking with two rhetorical figures the synecdoche and the asyndeton. The first one is a trope that takes a part for the whole and the second one connects phrases without syntactic nexus, conjunctions or adverbs. Can we relate those figures to photographs? If there is a way to relate rhetoric figures with walking figures, why dont we see the photographic frame within these figures? A picture of me at the Statue of Liberty might not be me in New York City but is a way to announce I was there. A picture of me in front of a sign that says, We can solve all your doubts triggers infinite connections, or a sequence of photographs of a daytrip is definitely an ellipsis figure. Photography as a practice in travelling is also a way of experiencing the space, recognizing it as technological object and its use as a visual exploratory discursive practice. For de Certau (1984), recalling Emile Beneviste, the figures of these movements define at the same time the "symbolic order of the unconscious" and some process of subjectivity manifested in discourse. And later on, de Certau states, that this catalogue of rhetoric figures is rather a stratification, where stories are becoming private and sink in individuality, while there are others propagated by media in a certain way totalizing under the figure of the City (De Certau, 1984). A tourist photograph of Niagara Falls is a subjective image that speaks about an individual point of view. Also sink in a great amount of similar images of other tourists and images of the sight propagated through media. In tourist photography similarities have been drawn as a blanket that covers everyone, but the differences are still complex due to the presence of a thinking body, time, and experience. The photographic image triggers a subjective recalling of dead time and unrepeatable experience, and photographing as an action confronts the individual and the common, in a intertwined experience that allocate the individual into

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the social space. Photography plays its signs around absence: absence of the total (total experience, total space and so on), absence of the viewer while taking the pictures, or absence of my experience while seeing it. At the same time the total cannot be seen as homogeneous because it will always be anchored in the individual. The totalizing figure of the city would be always shaped by individual representations of experience. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Aug, M. (1995). Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. (2 ed) London: Verso. Crang, M. (2011). Tourist: Moving Places, Becoming Tourist, Becoming Ethnographer. In Geographies of mobilities practices, spaces, subjects. Cresswell, T. & Merriman, P. Andover, Hants: Ashgate. 205-224. De Certeau, Michel.(1984) "Walking in the City." The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haldrup, Michael and Larsen, Jonas(2006) 'Material Cultures of Tourism', Leisure Studies, 25: 3, 275 289 Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Oxford, OX, UK: Blackwell MacCannell, D. (1976). The tourist: a new theory of the leisure class. New York: Schocken Books.

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Merleau-Ponty, M., Fisher, A. L.. (1969). The essential writings of Merleau-Ponty. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Osborne, Peter D.(2000) Paradox amusements: tourism and the modern image. Travelling Light: photography travel and visual culture. Manchester University Press. Pessoa, F. (1991). The book of disquiet. 1st American ed. New York: Pantheon Books. Sontag, S. (1977-1978). On photography. New York: Dell Publishing Co.. Tuan, Y. (1977). Space and place: the perspective of experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Urry, Jhon. (1990) The Tourist Gaze. The Tourist Gaze: leisure and travel in contemporary societies. London. Sage Publications.

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